Reciprocity and Sharing in an Underground File Sharing Community

This paper presents an ethnography of an underground music file sharing community. Roswell exists as a means to download and share digital music. The web-based community is based on distributed peer-to-peer technology and uses BitTorrent protocols to share content. Actor-Network Theory is used to understand importance of reciprocity and sharing in an online file sharing community, and the role that obligations and banishment play in encouraging active participation. This paper contributes to the Information Systems literature by applying Actor- Network Theory to an ethnographic empirical study of an online music community

Safe peer-to-peer self-downloading

International audienc

Safe Peer-to-Peer Self-downloading

International audiencePeer-to-peer applications share files between users themselves rather than downloading files from file servers. Self-downloading protocols have the property that eventually, every user downloads only from other users. This paper considers efficient ways of dividing files into segments so that users can exit the system as soon as file downloading is complete. One vulnerability of file sharing between peers is the possibility that files or segments could be counterfeit or corrupt. Protocols that are d-safe tolerate some number of instances of faulty segments in a file being downloaded, because each segment is downloaded d times before being uploadable. It is shown that d-safe self-downloading is possible for a sufficiently large arrival rate of users to the system. In addition, the paper presents upper and lower connectivity and sharing bounds for d = 2