Abstract—Copyright infringement using BitTorrent has
become a major problem in the creative industries; however, no
reliable technical means are available to prevent piracy. The
packet filtering method, which is used to inspect network traffic
and to detect problems, puts a heavy strain on network
resources. At the same time, there is a big controversy over the
privacy in communications and the authority to investigate.
This paper proposes a tracking system to trace a heavy
uploader, who illegally shares a significant amount of
copyrighted contents through BitTorrent. The proposed
tracking system analyzes the seed file of an illegal torrent,
acquires the swarm tracker’s address, and retrieves the IP
address or MAC address of a peer from the swarm list, which is
a list of peers sharing copyrighted contents from the tracker.
Interception and/or inspection of network packets with
personal information can be an offense against privacy laws.
However, the proposed heavy-uploader tracking method avoids
these legal issues by gathering information about
content-sharing peers through a client program. A heavy
uploader can be determined using an acquired identifying
address and a list of copyrighted content.
Index Terms—BitTorrent, copyright infringement, heavy
uploader, tracking system.
Jihah Nah is with the Copyright Protection Research Institute,
Sangmyung University, Korea (e-mail: jihah.nah@gmail.com).
Jongweon Kim is with the Dept. of Intellectual Property, Sangmyung
University, Korea (e-mail: jwkim@smu.ac.kr).
Cite: Jihah Nah and Jongweon Kim, "Heavy-Uploader Tracking System Design in BitTorrent Environment," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 4, no. 5, pp. 416-420, 2014.