Summary: "some people give away free (others') movies, and then put some links to their private adsense-laden portals in a README file or somesuch. This accounts for a very large percentage of the downloads from the pirate bay."
Very interesting findings, but it doesn't really answer the question of how important these people are to the pirate ecosystem. Are they just taking releases from more-private "underground" seeders and putting them on the pirate bay (in which case they are, effectively, just spammers and their elimination wouldn't really hurt the pirates) or do they actually provide the content themselves?
Most of the content on tpb comes from the scene which does not condone p2p sharing. These people just have access to scene releases early and want to profit from it.
Sadly, the report does not list any of the usernames of those that they studied. However, if you just go to a category, pick a frequent submitter, and look at their uploads most of the time there tags from many different groups. Some even try to claim other's releases as their own.
Haha, that's awesome! The FTP scene is so big they need distributed ftp agents to FXP their wares?
I always thought their drama and "wars" over shit like sharing files (....like it's not going to happen? not like they're using DRM or something) was incredibly overblown, even as a kid. Glad to see they're just as retarded now as ever.
Their elimination would slow the system to a crawl I'd imagine, in Australia at least the uploads are always capped low enough that seeding back will slow down the rest of your web activities. So it isn't feasible unless your not at the computer to seed back at any decent frequency. When something new hits the pirate bay and is popular it is already pretty slow.
Very interesting findings, but it doesn't really answer the question of how important these people are to the pirate ecosystem. Are they just taking releases from more-private "underground" seeders and putting them on the pirate bay (in which case they are, effectively, just spammers and their elimination wouldn't really hurt the pirates) or do they actually provide the content themselves?