This article gives a technical breakdown on how bit torrent programs function, and it also gives an insight to how unfair they can be to some users. The fact that people are able to choose whether they are going to contribute to helping the community or not, I found was a big factor in the overall functionality of bit torrent.

As Paul originally found through his analysis of the article, the proposition the author makes that a change to bit torrent should happen and that all users must seed and in a sense return the favour may not necessarily be the right answer. Bit torrent at the moment is the most utilised form of Internet traffic and if it were to be changed so that users were forced to reciprocate with other users, they may want to find something that is less restrictive and could see the decline in overall bit torrent activity.

This article again relates to the numerous bit torrent articles that I researched; the views are also similar in findings and overall approach. I feel that the article is very opinionated and provides a look into how the community functions, however as Paul also expressed and through my own personal experience, I'm not sure whether changing bit torrent to restrict free riding is something that would necessarily help it to function.

This particular paper looks into the bit torrent community while focusing on the popular American Cartoon-Comedy Family Guy. The article looks into how bit torrent is able to make downloading and sharing of multimedia between users easy and in doing so is able to create in this case, a group of Family Guy fans that are exchanging episodes.

Unlike perhaps some of the other articles that I looked at, this article looks at the possible social groups that can arise from file sharing and bit torrent and how they can become an extension and overall tool to help create social connections with others. It is able to show the impact that bit torrent is able to have to offline social groups as well as creating online groups and communities through methods that I saw through my own reading.

The study seemed particularly interesting to me as I probably considered myself to be a part of a similar social dynamic back in High-School when it came to file-sharing and also even now. The fact that programs like Family Guy and even music and other forms of media are readily available on the Internet and through bit torrent allows for that social connection and I guess water-cooler talk which helps to hone and strengthen offline social relationships.

Jun, S., Ahamad, M. Incentives in Bit Torrent Induce Free Riding (2005) Retrieved from http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2005/paper-JunAha.pdf

Finally another article that looked at the possible incentives that could be incorporated into the Bit Torrent community. This particular article focuses on a couple of the different incentive mechanisms that are on offer. Firstly the choking/unchoking method, but also a proposed mechanism where instead of the lottery like system employed with choking it's a more even spread of peer uploading, and the amount uploaded is based on the amount that a peer is willing to risk to possibly "establish cooperation" There is always the possibility that others may take advantage of a particular peer who may upload more generously than others but this way cooperation and the overall community could be strengthened as a peer may benefit if they go through a repeated exchange period and cooperate.

Through the proposed mechanism in the article links between peers could be more easily forged, which is less possible in the choking system where a connection is dropped as soon as a better one is found. Free riders also receive benefits in this system. The article carries out a study to see which of the mechanisms proves more effective, and while the original choking mechanism proves to be more effective it is still susceptible to the free riders that have plagued it beforehand. As I have seen throughout the vast majority of articles that I have read, free riders are still heavily impacting the longevity and overall effectiveness of the Bit Torrent community and collaboration system.

Van Werkhoven, B. Communities build robustness in Bit Torrent (2010) Retrieved from http://www.pds.ewi.tudelft.nl/~epema/ASCIa9/2010/Papers/Werkhoven.pdf

This particular article looks at the mechanisms that the Bit Torrent sharing system has in place in order to create incentives for users to "unchoke" the torrent files that they are downloading. The article also reviews the existing incentive models that are in place, and unchoking algorithms and how the Bit Torrent clients are intended to be robust to handle strategies like this.

In terms of community and cooperation in the article, it mirrors and tends to agree with Hales and Paratin and what other articles have said, which is that "Meta-data search is completely left to the users in BitTorrent and thus relies on websites to spread the torrent files and trackers to provide an entry point into the downloading swarm." This has mean the introduction of communities on these websites and because of this has seen the network split into many different independent swarms, which while some have consider it a weakness it was Hales and Patarin that "argue that it is actually a key strength of the BitTorrent system."
As is noted in the Hales and Patarin article and also here, if the independent swarms all become one we could see the swarm turn into a majority of free riders which may collapse the community and collaborative effort that is in place with the Bit Torrent system. The introduction of clients such as BitThief and BitTyrant have made free riding an even easier task. Today still "Over 21 millions of users are still using public BitTorrent websites, such as The Pirate Bay, at any given moment" and most of the data is still provided by seeders who unlike many private communities have no incentive at all to actually do so and the article believes that "This behavior can be explained by the fact that people do not always act selfishly when they could."

Patarin, S., Hales, D. How to cheat BitTorrent and why nobody does (2006) Retrieved from http://cfpm.org/~david/papers/19-eccs06.pdf

This next article that I looked at was How to cheat BitTorrent and why nobody does, written by Simon Patarin and David Hales. The main points behind the article is how easy both Patarin and Hales believe that the sharing of Bit Torrent could be cheated like it is on so many other forms of P2P, but despite this there is a sense of loyalty and in their words "altruistic" mentality that surrounds the Bit Torrent community.

The article believes to stray away from the explanation of why there are communities and collaboration within the Bit Torrent protocol. Believing that the tit-for-tat or TFT structure "can not be the full explanation since it can not account for the pure altruism of seeders, isn't the best strategy in any case and can easily be subverted with a little hacking of the client."
Instead, looking at Meta-Data and how it could possibly strengthen, and improve how users are able search and find user specific swarms that they can join, that are full of "good guys" who are helping the community of users. If the swarm or tribe that they are apart of isn't performing to a certain level or isn't altruistic enough for them, they can leave and find one that is. It is concluded that this may also have a negative effect on the community and altruism as by allowing good swarms to be differentiated and easily found it means that they will eventually transform into one large swarm that can be abused.
Overall the article asks the question, why exactly do the social connections that the Bit Torrent protocol creates continue to function? And what exactly is going on?

Andrade, N., Mowbray, M., Lima, A., Wagner, G., & Ripeanu, M. (2005) Influences on Cooperation in BitTorrent Communities Retrieved from http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~matei/PAPERS/p2pecon.05.pdf

The first article that I have looked at Influences on Cooperation in Bit Torrent Communities, is a 2005 study that looks at how co-operation takes place within the Bit Torrent communities. The study's description of a Bit Torrent is "Bit Torrent is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file- distribution tool that employs a tit-for-tat incentive mechanism to reduce freeriding and increase user cooperation."

The study firstly makes note of how Bit Torrent peers will most likely reciprocate and upload and co-operate and share with other peers in the community if they too have uploaded recently.

Focusing on five different file-sharing communities, the study looks to gauge the level of co-operation in each, breaking them up and defining "three metrics for cooperation: freeriding, seeding and sharing ratios". Free riders being peers that are just downloading and not uploading after their download is complete, Seeding is a peer that is still connected to the torrent file after completing their download and the sharing ratio is the total amount uploaded divided by the total downloaded.

As the study explains, although unlike other P2P systems, Bit Torrents do have centralized components and while this may have drawbacks, such as a single point of failure, it allows for new functionality to boost user co-operation. Methods such as Sharing-ratio enforcement, which is implemented by some torrent websites where they are able to prevent access to new torrents and content to peers who do not upload to a certain sharing-ratio threshold. The other method being Broad-catching, which is the use of the Bit Torrent clients to automatically download files that are advertised through RSS feeds. This may help with cooperation as users may keep their torrents running longer as new content is being automatically downloaded.

The Bit Torrent communities in the study were etree, piratebay, torrentportal, easytree and btefnet, each with a differing number of torrents and peers. Results of the study showed that "Bit Torrent communities supports the claim that the incentives for cooperation employed by the Bit Torrent protocol do succeed in discouraging freeriding." It was also found that "torrents with a large number of seeders, the Bit Torrent tit-for-tat mechanism may not succeed in producing a disincentive for freeriding: in such torrents, freeriders may actually experience faster download times than co- operating peers."

So in a sense the overall article shows that there is definitely a Bit Torrent community that is present. However, it seems that within the community there are some users who are not cooperating or collaborating information with others but instead are free riding, which seems to be ruining (perhaps a bit strong) the experience for other community members.