HOW WE COLLECTED THE DATA
Looking into P2P file-sharing clients we found videos, mp3’s, software, and even EBooks which are all very commonly traded. We found none so popular as movie files. Choosing movies to be our test subject, we next decided on choosing the site Mininova.org as our torrent site because of its vast popularity, ubiquity and generic feel. We then picked the 3 most seeded movies from there as our test files (Baby Mama, How to rob a Bank, Diving Bell and the Butterfly -- each produced in 2008) and for each hour in a 24 hour period span, we took turns recording the amount of seeders who were downloading each of the three movies without sharing it first (seeding at less than 100%), and those who were downloading it while sharing it too (seeding at 100%). [We assumed that one arbitrary 24 hour period of time would be a fair representation of the world’s P2P activities because there are so many variables to find reason to distinguish the week from the weekend and therefore one day from another]. From these data measurements we traced each of the IP addresses, which ranged in numbers from twenty to near ten thousand P2P users throughout the world per movie using Visual IP trace 2008. The program converted the IP names to their corresponding countries of the world and then outputted them to Excel spreadsheets.
