User Behavior and Change: File-sharers and Copyright Laws
Gavaldà -Miralles A, Otto JS, Bustamante FE, Amaral LAN, Duch J, Guimerà RProceedings of the 10th ACM CoNEXT 2014 , 319 - 324 (2014)
Abstract
Though the impact of file-sharing of copyrighted content has been
discussed for over a decade, only in the past few years have
countries begun to adopt legislation to criminalize this behavior.These
laws impose penalties ranging from warnings and monetary fines to
disconnecting Internet service. While their supporters are quick to
point out trends showing the efficacy of these laws at reducing use of
file-sharing sites, their analyses rely on brief snapshots of activity
that cannot reveal long- and short-term trends.
In this paper, we introduce an approach to model user behavior based on
a hidden Markov model and apply it to analyze a two-
year-long user-level trace of download activity of over 38k users from
around the world. This approach allows us to quantify the true impact of
file-sharing laws on user behavior, identifying behavioral trends
otherwise difficult to identify. For instance, despite an initial
reduction in activity in New Zealand when a three-strikes law took
effect, after two months activity had returned to the level observed
prior to the law being enacted. Given that punishment seems to, at best,
result in short-term compliance, we suggest that incentives-based
approaches may be more effective at changing user behavior.