BTM - An Automated Rule-based BT Monitoring System for Piracy Detection

With the advent of peer-to-peer communication technologies, individuals can easily connect to one another over Internet for file sharing and online chatting. Although these technologies provide wonderful platforms for users to share their digital materials, its illegitimate use on unauthorized sharing of copyrighted files is increasingly rampant. With the BitTorrent (BT) technology, the tracking down of these illegal activities is even more difficult as the downloaders can also act as the distributors and cooperate to provide different parts of the same file for sharing. It is close to impossible for law enforcement agencies to trace these distributed and short-duration Internet piracy activities with limited resources. In this paper, we present the first automated rule-based software system, the BitTorrent monitoring (BTM) system, for monitoring, recording, and analyzing suspicious BT traffic on the Internet. From a preliminary experiment on a real case, the system successfully located 126 distributors (a.k.a. seeders) for some Cantonese pop songs within 90 minutes.