Uploader Motivations and Consumer Dynamics in the One-Click File Hosting Ecosystem

Abstract

Internet piracy is a significant ongoing problem for content producers and rights holders. Estimates of the cost of copyright infringement to the film and music industries range in the tens to hundreds of billions of dollars every year. The vast majority of this illegal content is shared using three key technologies: peer-to-peer (P2P) protocols such as BitTorrent, illegal file streaming, and one-click file hosting services (OCHs). The current dominant analogy for file- sharing, promoted by copyright holders and industry lobby groups, is one of 'copyright theft'; with content uploaders predominantly depicted as opportunists motivated by financial gain. Recently, academics from various disciplines have begun to question this narrative, proposing alternative models for understanding piracy based on the concept of the social or 'altruistic' sharer. In this paper, two OCH indexes were studied for insights into uploader dynamics. Results suggest that traditional understandings of Internet piracy are significantly limited in their ability to explain a number of aspects of the current OCH ecosystem. A significant number of uploaders are found to be behaving in ways that do not fit the traditional economic narrative; large numbers of users are making negligible money, and aggregate figures show a significant amount of uploaders are failing to take actions to appropriately maximise their hypothetical earnings.

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