Insights of file-sharing system forums

Abstract

One-click file hosting systems (1-CFHS) have become a prominent means to exchange files across the Internet. Studies have previously identified that a lot of the hosted content is infringing on its owner's copyright, and some of the most well know 1-CFHSs have been taken offline as a result of this. In this paper, we present a pilot study of how links to, and copies of, such content are exchanged via online forums. We have crawled and parsed pages fromfour of themost prominent sites over a period of a few months in order to extract URLs to these items. These URLs have then been periodically tested until they became unavailable in order to derive the lifespan of these copies on various 1-CFHS. We find that URLs are mostly posted once, presumably by their creators, and that unauthorised content on 1-CFHSs has an availability expectancy of about 40 days before being taken down.We propose an initial simple life-and-death model for such content in the form of a Markov chain. We also show that the 1-CFHS market is still unstable, with most of the past leader services having disappeared from the current charts.