money quotes:
A scientific study has estimated that just 100 internet users are ultimately responsible for publishing most (almost 67%) of all the "illegal" (unlawful) copyright content (music, tv shows, movies, games and applications) on public P2P (BitTorrent) file sharing networks.
The study itself breaks the users down into three main groups: fake publishers, altruistic top publishers and profit-driven publishers. The primary two are defined as follows.
Group 1: Fake publishers are either antipiracy agencies or malicious users who are responsible for 30% of the content and 25% of the downloads. These publishers sustain a continuous poisoning-like index attack against BitTorrent portals that affects millions of downloaders.
Group 2: Profit-driven top publishers own fairly profitable web sites. They use major BitTorrent portals such as the Pirate Bay as a platform to advertise their web sites to millions of users. For this purpose they publish popular torrents where they attach the URL of their web sites in various manners. The publishers that pursue this approach are responsible for roughly 30% of the content and 40% of the downloads in BitTorrent.
For the past two or three years it's sometimes appeared as if Rights Holders have been waging a holy war against consumers. The new study suggests that their efforts might in fact be better targeted towards tackling the REAL source publishers of such content. By making money out of it these publishers are doing something that is truly illegal and not merely unlawful (civil offence).
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/201...g-content.html