Tracking and mitigating piracy

Abstract

The DVD piracy problem is analyzed as a benchmark case study of propagation of potentially sensitive information through the small-world social network and the scale-free Internet. The fundamental mathematical concept is that of a hybrid network, that is, two graphs, one with positive curvature the other with negative curvature, connected with an exchange mechanism. It is shown that this propagation model on a hybrid network matches real traces of DVD piracy. Some anti-piracy measures based on control concepts are suggested