Understanding Uploader Motivations and Sharing Dynamics in the One-Click Hosting Ecosystem

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). 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.