Is Content Publishing in BitTorrent Altruistic or Profit-Driven

BitTorrent is the most popular P2P content delivery application where individual users share various type of content with tens of thousands of other users. The growing popularity of BitTorrent is primarily due to the availability of valuable content without any cost for the consumers. However, apart from required resources, publishing (sharing) valuable (and often copyrighted) content has serious legal implications for user who publish the material (or publishers). This raises a question that whether (at least major) content publishers behave in an altruistic fashion or have other incentives such as financial. In this study, we identify the content publishers of more than 55k torrents in 2 major BitTorrent portals and examine their behavior. We demonstrate that a small fraction of publishers are responsible for 66% of published content and 75% of the downloads. Our investigations reveal that these major publishers respond to two different profiles. On one hand, antipiracy agencies and malicious publishers publish a large amount of fake files to protect copyrighted content and spread malware respectively. On the other hand, content publishing in BitTorrent is largely driven by companies with financial incentive. Therefore, if these companies lose their interest or are unable to publish content, BitTorrent traffic/portals may disappear or at least their associated traffic will significantly reduce

Investigating the reaction of BitTorrent content publishers to antipiracy actions

During recent years, a few countries have put in place online antipiracy laws and there has been some major enforcement actions against violators. This raises the question that to what extent antipiracy actions have been effective in deterring online piracy? This is a challenging issue to explore because of the difficulty to capture user behavior, and to identify the subtle effect of various underlying (and potentially opposing) causes. In this paper, we tackle this question by examining the impact of two major antipiracy actions, the closure of Megaupload and the implementation of the French antipiracy law, on publishers in the largest BitTorrent portal who are major providers of copyrighted content online. We capture snapshots of BitTorrent publishers at proper times relative to the targeted antipiracy event and use the trends in the number and the level of activity of these publishers to assess their reaction to these events. Our investigation illustrates the importance of examining the impact of antipiracy events on different groups of publishers and provides valuable insights on the effect of selected major antipiracy actions on publishers' behavior.This work has been partially supported by the European Union through the FP7 eCOUSIN (318398) and TREND (257740) Projects and the ITEA2 TWIRL Project (Call 5-10029), the Spanish Government under the CRAMNET project (TEC2012-38362-C03-01) and eeCONTENT Project (TEC2011- 29688-C02-02), the Regional Government of Madrid through the MEDIANET project (S-2009/TIC-1468), and the National Science Foundation under Grant IIS-0917381.European Community's Seventh Framework Progra

BitTorrent locality and transit trafficreduction: When, why, and at what cost?

A substantial amount of work has recently gone into localizing BitTorrent traffic within an ISP in order to avoid excessive and often times unnecessary transit costs. Several architectures and systems have been proposed and the initial results from specific ISPs and a few torrents have been encouraging. In this work we attempt to deepen and scale our understanding of locality and its potential. Looking at specific ISPs, we consider tens of thousands of concurrent torrents, and thus capture ISP-wide implications that cannot be appreciated by looking at only a handful of torrents. Second, we go beyond individual case studies and present results for few thousands ISPs represented in our data set of up to 40K torrents involving more than 3.9M concurrent peers and more than 20M in the course of a day spread in 11K ASes. Finally, we develop scalable methodologies that allow us to process this huge data set and derive accurate traffic matrices of torrents. Using the previous methods we obtain the following main findings: i) Although there are a large number of very small ISPs without enough resources for localizing traffic, by analyzing the 100 largest ISPs we show that Locality policies are expected to significantly reduce the transit traffic with respect to the default random overlay construction method in these ISPs; ii) contrary to the popular belief, increasing the access speed of the clients of an ISP does not necessarily help to localize more traffic; iii) by studying several real ISPs, we have shown that soft speed-aware locality policies guarantee win-win situations for ISPs and end users. Furthermore, the maximum transit traffic savings that an ISP can achieve without limiting the number of inter-ISP overlay links is bounded by “unlocalizable” torrents with few local clients. The application of restrictions in the number of inter-ISP links leads to a higher transit traffic reduction but the QoS of clients downloading “unlocalizable” torrents would be severely harmed.The research leading to these results has been partially funded by the European Union's FP7 Program under the projects eCOUSIN (318398) and TREND (257740), the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the eeCONTENT project (TEC2011-29688-C02-02), and the Regional Government of Madrid under the MEDIANET Project (S2009/TIC-1468).Publicad

Security Engineering of Patient-Centered Health Care Information Systems in Peer-to-Peer Environments: Systematic Review

Background: Patient-centered health care information systems (PHSs) enable patients to take control and become knowledgeable about their own health, preferably in a secure environment. Current and emerging PHSs use either a centralized database, peer-to-peer (P2P) technology, or distributed ledger technology for PHS deployment. The evolving COVID-19 decentralized Bluetooth-based tracing systems are examples of disease-centric P2P PHSs. Although using P2P technology for the provision of PHSs can be flexible, scalable, resilient to a single point of failure, and inexpensive for patients, the use of health information on P2P networks poses major security issues as users must manage information security largely by themselves. Objective: This study aims to identify the inherent security issues for PHS deployment in P2P networks and how they can be overcome. In addition, this study reviews different P2P architectures and proposes a suitable architecture for P2P PHS deployment. Methods: A systematic literature review was conducted following PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) reporting guidelines. Thematic analysis was used for data analysis. We searched the following databases: IEEE Digital Library, PubMed, Science Direct, ACM Digital Library, Scopus, and Semantic Scholar. The search was conducted on articles published between 2008 and 2020. The Common Vulnerability Scoring System was used as a guide for rating security issues. Results: Our findings are consolidated into 8 key security issues associated with PHS implementation and deployment on P2P networks and 7 factors promoting them. Moreover, we propose a suitable architecture for P2P PHSs and guidelines for the provision of PHSs while maintaining information security. Conclusions: Despite the clear advantages of P2P PHSs, the absence of centralized controls and inconsistent views of the network on some P2P systems have profound adverse impacts in terms of security. The security issues identified in this study need to be addressed to increase patients\u27 intention to use PHSs on P2P networks by making them safe to use

Diseño e implementación de un plugin para un cliente bittorent mejorado con un sistema de recomendación y detección de contenidos falsos

Las redes P2P (Peer-to-Peer) son la herramienta más utilizada para la compartición de ficheros. Su aparición conllevó el crecimiento del número de usuarios de Internet. La popularidad de estas redes de intercambio se mantiene debido a la posibilidad de disponer de contenidos como música, software o películas sin coste para los usuarios de manera sencilla. La disponibilidad de contenidos en streaming en Internet, la incorporación de sistemas a la carta en televisión o los servidores de contenido son algunos de los agentes que compiten contra las redes P2P pero éstas siguen siendo muy utilizadas. El protocolo BitTorrent sigue la filosofía P2P y es el sistema de intercambio de contenido más utilizado. Sólo teniendo en cuenta dos de los programas que implementan este protocolo, BitTorrent Mainline y μTorrent, se llega a más de 400000 descargas nuevas al día de los clientes y 20 millones de usuarios diarios. Sin embargo, el protocolo BitTorrent presenta la desventaja de estar muy ligado a las acciones que realice el usuario, como escoger sus descargas o localizar los ficheros torrent. Por este motivo las aplicaciones P2P están apostando por la descentralización y las recomendaciones de contenidos. El enfoque centralizado de BitTorrent viene dado por: Necesita un servidor que coordine la descarga de contenido. Requiere un archivo torrent para iniciar la descarga, normalmente disponible a través de páginas que mantienen un índice de contenidos, aunque puede ser publicado y distribuido a través de otros métodos. No ofrece al usuario ninguna garantía o método sencillo de comprobación del contenido compartido en un torrent, por ello las páginas de descargas o foros de intercambio actúan como filtros de recomendación y control de calidad evitando así contenidos falsos, inadecuados o peligrosos. Por este motivo, en la actualidad se pretende dotar a las aplicaciones P2P existentes de herramientas que eviten estas dependencias. Aunque están apareciendo también nuevos clientes P2P adaptados a las nuevos requerimientos pero que aún no disponen de la popularidad de los ya existentes. En concreto, este Proyecto está enfocado a automatizar el procedimiento llevado a cabo por los usuarios del cliente BitTorrent llamado Vuze (pudiéndose extender en el futuro a otros clientes) basándose en las siguientes líneas de desarrollo: Almacenar información detallada de las descargas llevadas a cabo por los usuarios para poder desarrollar un sistema de recomendación basado en los historiales de descargas. Proveer de un sistema de alerta que avise al usuario de la falsedad del contenido de sus descargas basándose en los resultados aportados por una aplicación que detecta fakes. Vuze ha sido el cliente escogido para el desarrollo de este Proyecto ya que cuenta con cerca de 100 millones de usuarios al mes y es el cliente elegido por el 25% de los usuarios de The Pirate Bay [5]. Por ello, la aplicación cliente-servidor desarrollada para este cliente pretende aprovechar su popularidad solventando las necesidades actuales del gran número de usuarios que dispone y facilitando la utilización del programa.Ingeniería Técnica en Sonido e Image

온라인 게임과 컨텐트 공유 네트워크 분석을 통한 온라인 군집 현상의 이해

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 전기·컴퓨터공학부, 2015. 2. 권태경.Quantification of collective human behavior and understanding the group characteristics in the Internet is important in user behavior studies since people tend to gather together and form groups due to their inherent nature. On the Internet, people are also often forming a group for a specific purpose such as i) an online group in games (e.g., MMORPGs) to experience various social interactions with other players or accomplish a difficult quest with teammates or ii) a swarm in peer-to-peer network to share a content to utilize a higher download rate with an availability. To this end, we studied the two most well-known major applications in the Internet that people are actively using with different purposesi) MMORPGs and ii) BitTorrent. In this dissertation, we analyze the i) group activities of users in Aion, one of the largest MMORPGs, based on the records of the activities of 94,497 users and ii) crowd phenomena of BitTorrent. First, in a case study of Aion, we focus on (i) how social interactions within a group differ from the ones across groups, (ii) what makes a group rise, sustain, or fall, (iii) how group members join and leave a group, and (iv) what makes a group end. We first find that structural patterns of social interactions within a group are more likely to be close-knit and reciprocative than the ones across groups.We also observe that members in a rising group (i.e., the number of members increases) are more cohesive, and communicate with more evenly within the group than the ones in other groups. Our analysis further reveals that if a group is not cohesive, not actively communicating, or not evenly communicating among members, members of the group tend to leave. Second, we investigate what kinds of crowd phenomena of content exist and why different patterns of crowd phenomena appears and how we can exploit content crowd phenomena considering the content category, publisher, and population of content in BitTorrent. To this end,We conduct comprehensive measurements on content locality in one of the largest BitTorrent portals: The Pirate Bay. In particular, we focus on (i) how content is consumed from spatial and temporal perspectives, (ii) what makes content be consumed with disparity in spatial and temporal domains, and (iii) how we can exploit the content locality. We find that content consumption in real swarms is 4.56 times and 1.46 times skewed in spatial (country) and temporal (time) domains, respectively. We observe that a cultural factor (e.g., language) mainly affects spatial locality of content. Not only the time-sensitivity of content but also the publishing purpose affects temporal locality of content.We reveal that spatial locality of content iii rarely changes on a daily basis (microscopic level), but there is notably spatial spread of content consumption over the years (macroscopic level). Based on the observation, we conduct simulations to show that bundling and caching can exploit the content locality.Abstract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii I. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.1 Crowd Phenomena in Massively Multi-player Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1.2 Crowd Phenomena in BitTorrent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 II. RelatedWork . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 2.1 Crowd Phenomena in MMORPGs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 2.1.1 Social Interactions in MMORPGs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 2.1.2 Group Activities in MMORPGs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 2.1.3 Group Activities in Other Online Services . . . . . . . . . . 7 2.2 Crowd Phenomena (Locality) in BitTorrent . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 2.2.1 Peer Localization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 2.2.2 Crowd Phenomena in BitTorrent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 2.2.3 Locality in Other Domains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 III. Group Activities in Online Social Game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 3.1 Aion overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 3.1.1 Game Features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 3.1.2 Datasets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 3.2 Group Affiliation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 v 3.2.1 How prevalent are group activities in Aion? . . . . . . . . . 14 3.2.2 Effect of Joining a Group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 3.2.3 Social Interactions Within a Group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 3.3 Group Dynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 3.3.1 Group Cohesion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 3.3.2 Group Diversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 3.3.3 Group Locality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 3.3.4 Survival Rate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 3.3.5 Dichotomy in Stable Groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 3.4 Group Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 3.4.1 Properties of the Group Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 3.4.2 Structural Holes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 3.5 Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 3.5.1 Why people leave groups? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 3.5.2 Why a group ends? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 IV. Crowd phenomena of BitTorrent in Spatial and Temporal Perspective 46 4.1 Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 4.1.1 Discovering Swarm Topology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 4.1.2 Dataset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 4.1.3 Representativeness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 4.2 Spatial Locality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 4.2.1 Locality Metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 4.2.2 Swarm, Community, and Neighbor . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 vi 4.2.3 Content Categories, Publishers, and Popularity . . . . . . . 55 4.2.4 Spatial Locality Over Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 4.3 Temporal Locality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 4.3.1 Existence of Temporal Locality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 4.3.2 Categories, Publishers, and Popularity . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 4.3.3 Temporal Usage Trends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 4.4 How to Exploit Locality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 V. Summary & Future Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76Docto

BitTorrent 시스템에서 컨텐트 번들링 및 배포

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 전기·컴퓨터공학부, 2013. 2. 최양희.BitTorrent는 컨텐트 공유에 사용되는 가장 인기있는 인터넷 소프트웨어이다. BitTorrent가 널리 사용됨에 따라, 연구자들은 BitTorrent의 처리량, 공정성, 인센티브와 같은 이슈에 대해 연구해 왔고, 이러한 연구들은 BitTorrent 성능과 관련된 가치있는 결과들을 보여주었다. 하지만 대부분의 연구에서는, BitTorrent에서의 컨텐트 번들링 및 배포 전략과 관련해서 (1) BitTorrent 배포자가 파일을 어떤 목적으로 어떻게 번들 하는지와 (2) BitTorrent의 배포자들이 그들의 목적을 성취하기 위해 어떠한 전략들을 사용하는지 등에 대해 다루고 있지 않다. 본 학위 논문에서는, 앞서 언급한 문제들을 측정된 데이터를 바탕으로 조사하기 위해서, BitTorrent 포탈중 가장 큰 규모인 The Pirate Bay (TPB)에 대한 종합적인 측정 연구를 수행하였다. 측정된 데이터셋은 12만개의 토런트와 1600만명의 사용자로 구성되었고, 컨텐트 배포자를 (i) 가짜 배포자, (ii) 이윤추구 배포자, (iii) 이타적 배포자 세가지 종류로 분류하여 연구를 진행하였다. 또한 영화, TV, 성인물, 음악, 응용프로그램, 게임, 전자책과 같은 컨텐트 카테고리에 따라 번들링과 컨테트 배포 현황이 어떻게 되는지 조사하였다. 첫번째로, 토런트의 구조적 패턴과 스왐 참여자의 행동 패턴을 파악하기 위해 컨텐트 번들링과 관련된 현황을 조사하였다. 특별히, (1) 얼마나 컨텐트 번들링이 널리 사용되는가, (2) 어떤 파일들이 어떻게 토런트로 번들되는가, (3) 왜 배포자들이 파일을 번들해서 사용하는가, (4) 사용자들이 번들된 파일들을 어떻게 다운로드 받는가에 초점을 맞추어 연구를 수행하였다. 측정결과 72% 이상의 토런트들이 여러개의 파일로 구성되어 있는 것을 알 수 있었고, 이것은 번들이 BitTorrent의 파일 공유를 위해 널리 사용되고 있음을 보여준다. 그리고 경제적인 이득을 위해 웹사이트를 광고하는 이윤추구 배포자들이 번들을 선호하여 사용하는 경향이 있음을 알 수 있었다. 또한 번들된 토런트의 대부분의 파일(94%)이 사용자들에 의해 선택되고, 번들된 토런트가 번들이 아닌 토런트보다 평균적으로 더 인기가 좋음을 알 수 있었다. 전체적으로, 토런트의 구조적 패턴과 스왐 참여자의 특징은 컨텐트의 카테고리 종류에 따라서, 그리고 번들된 토런트인지 번들되지 않은 토런트인지에 따라서 주목할만한 차이점이 있음을 발견할 수 있었다. 다음으로, 사회경제적 관점에서 BitTorrent의 컨텐트 배포 패턴을 (1) 배포자에 의해서 파일이 어떻게 배포되는가, (2) 각 배포자들은 어떤 전략들을 사용하는가, (3) 배포 전략들이 얼마나 효과가 있는가의 측면에서 조사하였다. 측정결과 상당한 양의 트래픽(61%)이 가짜 토런트를 다운받을 때 발생하고 있는 것을 알 수 있었고, 이는 많은 양의 인터넷 트래픽이 불필요하게 낭비되고 있음을 보여 주는 것이다. 따라서 본 측정 결과로부터 알 수 있는 가짜 배포자들의 배포 패턴을 고려해서 TPB의 가짜 배포자를 걸러낼 수 있는 방법을 제안하였고, 제안된 방법이 전체 다운로드 트래픽의 45% 가량을 줄일 수 있음을 보여 주었다. 또한 이윤추구 배포자들은 그들의 수익모델(예를 들어, 개인 트래커 사이트에 새로운 사용자를 영입하는 것이나 사람들이 사진과 연결된 URL 링크를 클릭하도록 하는 것)에 따라 다른 배포 전략을 이용하고 있음을 알 수 있었다.BitTorrent is one of the most popular applications for sharing contents over the Internet. The huge success of BitTorrent has attracted the research community to investigate BitTorrent's behavior in terms of throughput, fairness, and incentive issues, revealing valuable insights into the performance aspects of BitTorrent. However, most of these studies paid little attention to understand content bundling and publishing strategies in BitTorrent from the following perspectives: (1) how, and for what purposes, are constituent files bundled by BitTorrent publishers? and (2) what strategies are adopted by BitTorrent publishers to achieve their goals? To answer these questions with data from a large-scale BitTorrent system, we conduct comprehensive measurements on one of the largest BitTorrent portals: the Pirate Bay (TPB). From the datasets of the 120 K torrents and 16 M peers, we classify BitTorrent publishers into three types: (i) fake publishers, (ii) profit-driven publishers, and (iii) altruistic publishers. Throughout this dissertation, we investigate the current practice of bundling and publishing across different content categories: Movie, TV, Porn, Music, Application, Game, and E-book. We first investigate the current practice of content bundling to understand the structural patterns of torrents and the participant behaviors of swarms. In particular, we focus on: (1) how prevalent content bundling is, (2) how and what files are bundled into torrents, (3) what motivates publishers to bundle files, and (4) how peers access the bundled files. We find that over 72% of BitTorrent torrents contain multiple files, which indicates that bundling is widely used for file sharing. We reveal that profit-driven BitTorrent publishers who promote their own web sites for financial gains like advertising tend to prefer to use the bundling. We also observe that most files (94%) in a bundle torrent are selected by users and the bundle torrents are more popular than the single (or non-bundle) ones on average. Overall, there are notable differences in the structural patterns of torrents and swarm characteristics (i) across different content categories and (ii) between single and bundle torrents. We next investigate the current practice of content publishing in BitTorrent from a socio-economic point of view, by unraveling (1) how files are published by publishers, (2) what strategies are adopted by publishers, and (3) how effective those strategies are. We show that a significant amount of traffic (61%) of BitTorrent has been generated (i.e., unnecessarily wasted) to download fake torrents. Therefore, we suggest a method to filter out fake publishers on TPB by considering their distinct publishing patterns learned from our measurement study, and show that the proposed method can reduce around 45% of the total download traffic. We also reveal that profit-driven publishers adopt different publishing strategies according to their revenue models (e.g., advertising private tracker sites to attract potential new members, or exposing image URLs to make people click the URL links).Abstract i I. Introduction 1 II. Related Work 5 2.1 Multi-torrent Systems 5 2.2 Bundling in BitTorrent 6 2.3 Bundling in Economics 7 2.4 Content publishing in BitTorrent 7 III. Methodology 9 3.1 Measurement Methodology 9 3.2 Publisher Classification 11 IV. Bundling Practice in BitTorrent: What, How, and Why 14 4.1 Introduction 14 4.2 Datasets 16 4.2.1 Torrent Datasets 17 4.2.2 Swarm Datasets 17 4.3 Single vs. Bundle 18 4.3.1 Bundling is widespread 18 4.3.2 How files are bundled 20 4.4 Main File Analysis in Bundling 27 4.4.1 Identifying Main Files 28 4.4.2 Constituents of Bundle-k 29 4.5 Publisher Analysis 32 4.5.1 Contribution of Top-20 Publishers 33 4.5.2 Cross-category Publishing of Top-20 Publishers 39 4.6 User Access Pattern Analysis 40 4.6.1 Popularity Analysis 40 4.6.2 Availability Analysis 43 4.6.3 The Number of Files Requested by Users in a Bundle Torrent 44 4.6.4 Swarm Behaviors versus Bundle-k 47 4.7 Discussions 50 V. Content Publishing Practice in BitTorrent 52 5.1 Introduction 52 5.2 The Number of Published Torrents 54 5.3 Publishers Strategies 58 5.3.1 Lifetime of Publishers and their Publishing Rates 59 5.3.2 Content Categories 60 5.3.3 Advertising Strategies of Profit-driven Publishers 63 5.4 Downloaders Behavior 64 5.5 Implications on Publishers Strategies 69 5.5.1 Fake Publishers 69 5.5.2 Profit-driven Publishers 71 VI. Summary & Future Work 73 Bibliography 75 Korean Abstract 80Docto

Measuring Infringement of Intellectual Property Rights

© Crown Copyright 2014. You may re-use this information (excluding logos) free of charge in any format or medium, under the terms of the Open Government Licence. To view this licence, visit http://www.nationalarchives.gov. uk/doc/open-government-licence/ Where we have identified any third party copyright information you will need to obtain permission from the copyright holders concernedThe review is wide-ranging in scope and overall our findings evidence a lack of appreciation among those producing research for the high-level principles of measurement and assessment of scale. To date, the approaches adopted by industry seem more designed for internal consumption and are usually contingent on particular technologies and/or sector perspectives. Typically, there is a lack of transparency in the methodologies and data used to form the basis of claims, making much of this an unreliable basis for policy formulation. The research approaches we found are characterised by a number of features that can be summarised as a preference for reactive approaches that look to establish snapshots of an important issue at the time of investigation. Most studies are ad hoc in nature and on the whole we found a lack of sustained longitudinal approaches that would develop the appreciation of change. Typically the studies are designed to address specific hypotheses that might serve to support the position of the particular commissioning body. To help bring some structure to this area, we propose a framework for the assessment of the volume of infringement in each different area. The underlying aim is to draw out a common approach wherever possible in each area, rather than being drawn initially to the differences in each field. We advocate on-going survey tracking of the attitudes, perceptions and, where practical, behaviours of both perpetrators and claimants in IP infringement. Clearly, the nature of perpetrators, claimants and enforcement differs within each IPR but in our view the assessment for each IPR should include all of these elements. It is important to clarify that the key element of the survey structure is the adoption of a survey sampling methodology and smaller volumes of representative participation. Once selection is given the appropriate priority, a traditional offline survey will have a part to play, but as the opportunity arises, new technological methodologies, particularly for the voluntary monitoring of online behaviour, can add additional detail to the overall assessment of the scale of activity. This framework can be applied within each of the IP right sectors: copyright, trademarks,patents, and design rights. It may well be that the costs involved with this common approach could be mitigated by a syndicated approach to the survey elements. Indeed, a syndicated approach has a number of advantages in addition to cost. It could be designed to reduce any tendency either to hide inappropriate/illegal activity or alternatively exaggerate its volume to fit with the theme of the survey. It also has the scope to allow for monthly assessments of attitudes rather than being vulnerable to unmeasured seasonal impacts