Music sales are loosing their role as a means for music dissemination but are still used by the music industry for ranking artist success, e.g., in the Billboard Magazine chart. Thus, it was suggested recently to use social networks as an alternative ranking system; a suggestion which is problematic due to the ease of manipulating the list and the difficulty of implementation. In this work we s...

File-sharing networks are distributed systems used to disseminate files among nodes of a communication network. The general simple principle of these systems is that once a node has retrieved a file, it may become a server for this file. In this paper, the capacity of these networks is analyzed with a stochastic model when there is a constant flow of incoming requests for a given file. It is sh...

File-sharing has become synonym with the “digital economy” where large music conglomerates as well as certain artist voice strong concern over the impact on their bottom line. This research analyzes the music industry, which has been heavily impacted by a major technological shift i.e. the invention, and rollout, of the Internet. We look to the technological shift that has enabled the downloadi...

P2P file sharing systems are distributed systems consisting of interconnected nodes able to self-organize in networks, with the purpose of sharing content. Recent empirical studies have shown that they suffer from freeloaders, that is, peers that consume many more resources or content than they contribute. In this paper we propose a coalition formation based incentive mechanism for P2P file sha...

Peer-to-peer file sharing applications have evolved to one of the major traffic sources in the Internet. In particular, the eDonkey file sharing system and its derivatives are causing high amounts of traffic volume in today’s networks. The eDonkey system is typically used for exchanging very large files like audio/video CDs or even DVD images. In this report we provide a measurement based traff...

BitTorrent as one of the leading P2P file sharing applications has dominant traffic in broadband access networks. In this paper we present the main characteristics of BitTorrent traffic based on actual measurements taken from a commercial network. Analysis results at both applicationand flow-levels are presented and discussed.

The free-rider phenomenon which impedes the marketing of information goods is conventionally countered by copyright protection regulations and technology. Alternative ways to market information goods, in particular through systems based on the super-distribution of a good from buyer to buyer, have recently raised some interest. Some of them mimic peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, while advanc...

Anonymous communication has gained more and more interest from Internet users as privacy and anonymity problems have emerged. Dedicated anonymous networks such as Freenet and I2P allow anonymous file-sharing among users. However, one major problem with anonymous file-sharing networks is that the available content is highly reduced, mostly with outdated files, and non-anonymous networks, such as...

As anonymous peer-to-peer file sharing networks transition from intellectual curiosity to societal reality, their long-term viability is seriously threatened by cheaters. A cheater either consumes resources without producing them (a freeloader), or advertises valuable content, but ultimately delivers that which is useless (a spoofer). In both cases, the cheater realizes some benefit from his ac...

The future of peer-to-peer file-sharing and related technologies is entwined, for better or worse, with copyright law. This paper aims to present a layperson's introduction to the copyright law principles most pertinent to peer-to-peer developers, including contributory and vicarious liability principles and potential legal defenses. After describing the current shape of the law, the paper conc...