International Journal of
Information and Education Technology

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.