It can be easy for me to think of BitTorrent as something void of any true human interaction. This paper however helps to show a social ecosystem which BitTorrent exists within. Namely, that it can be a key part of physical social groups which form around certain media, such as the example used in this paper: a group of Australian high-schoolers interested in Family Guy.

An interesting thing that can be taken from this paper is that it is good to look at BitTorrent as a part of the social groups which use it, alongside other tools used by those groups. Focussing on BitTorrent, like in all of the articles I shared, yields less useful understanding. This paper instead looks at how this group use BitTorrent alongside the tool of LAN, which allows it to share the downloaded content throughout the group. It shows how both of these tools help to facilitate the complex dynamics of the social group's individuals. How they share, why they share and how their identity is affected by what they share.

This paper offers a much more clear and concise explanation of BitTorrent and its history than my "Resisting free-riding behavior in BitTorrent" article.

Li, Y., Gruenbacher, D., & Scoglio, C. (2012). Reward only is not enough: Evaluating and improving the fairness policy of the P2P file sharing network eMule/eDonkey. PEER-TO-PEER NETWORKING AND APPLICATIONS, 5, 40-57. Doi: 10.1007/s12083-011-0106-6

Newer and more easy to follow than my other article on the same subject, "Resisting free-riding behaviour in BitTorrent", this article once again proposes a solution to free-riders who download without reciprocating. It looks specifically at the example of Emule/Edonkey, which interestingly already has a "credit" based system which is purposed with creating fairness over the long term. This article looks into this system in detail and performs real world experiments on it and finds it lacking. It proposes its own solution while still adhering to the basic principles that Emule/Edonkey's system does and tests it in simulations.

Free-riding seems to be the main recurring issue with BitTorrent and it does not help contribute to the collaboration that occurs. This article also observes that new users can be seen as free-riders. One interesting flaw in this and other similar solutions is that it may alienate new users by restricting them before they have even had a chance to contribute anything. Emule/Edonkey's current credit based system does not identify and punish free-riders and this is immediately identified as a flaw by the article, and the unfairness of free-riders being able to download at comparable speeds to real contributors is assumed to be something that needs rectifying.

Andrade, N., Santos-Neto, E., Brasileiro, F., & Ripeanu, M. (2008). Resource demand and supply in BitTorrent content-sharing communities. Computer Networks, 53, 515-527. Doi: http://dx.doi.org.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/10.1016/j.comnet.2008.09.029

This article looks at a few different BitTorrent communities and analyses them closely, looking at uploads and downloads in a supply and demand context. This is a good article because it shows how well BitTorrent users collaborate within the current system. It looks at resource contention, something which applies to about three-quarters of torrents and occurs when the demand for a torrent reaches a point where users downloads are slowed because the "supply" or uploads is too low and download speeds of leechers are limited as a result.

This article reveals interestingly that the long-tail applies in a similar way to BitTorrent as it does to more tangible examples of collaboration like Wikipedia. There are a small amount of uploaders who contribute a majority of resources. In one of the BitTorrent communities this was counterbalanced by the fact that the largest contributors were also the largest consumers. One of the three BitTorrent communities had most of its users contributing as well as downloading, whereas the other two had plenty of "free-riders".

This article acknowledges the power of BitTorrent and its overall effectiveness but also concludes that there could be improvements.

Wang, J., Shen, R., Ullrich, C., Luo, H., & Niu, Changyong. (2008). Resisting free-riding behavior in BitTorrent. Future Generation Computer Systems, 26, 1285-1299. Doi: http://dx.doi.org.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/10.1016/j.future.2009.05.014

This article offers the workings of BitTorrent from a technical standpoint. If you want to understand exactly how BitTorrent works along with the strengths and weaknesses that come with it this is the article for you. More specifically, this article focuses on the unfairness of BitTorrent. Users are able to download the files they want while reciprocating little or nothing.

Written by experts in computer science, the article is full intimidatingly complex mathematics and graphs, however many parts, including the introductions and conclusions of the entire piece and its sections yield more comprehensible information.

The most interesting aspect of the article is the proposition being made by the authors. They suggest a huge modification to the way BitTorrent works, suggesting that users should be more tightly restricted and forced to reciprocate in order to be able to download. They perform simulations and conclude that their "quota-based encrypted block trading protocol" would make for a vastly improved BitTorrent.

From a more scholarly and less technical standpoint, we could examine if such a change would be an ultimately positive thing. Perhaps the choice of being able to reciprocate has import beyond the hard maths of efficiency, and some users may cease to use BitTorrent entirely if it were modified in such a way as is being suggested here. Especially since, I would argue, collaboration on the Internet is usually characterised by optionality.