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P2P Piracy? Piffle!
jjohn writes: "Boston.com has an op-ed piece on peer-to-peer software like Napster. It concludes, not surprisingly, that
p2p software is in its infancy and isn't likely to credibly challenge
traditional distribution streams of copyrighted material any time soon."
What is really holding freenet back is the complete lack of a really sound search architecture. It's granted that in any system, only the top 5-10 percent will have a high enough bandwidth and reliabilty rating to be trusted in any long-term sense.
What I want in a freenet search engine:
1) List of hits.
2) Hits ranked by previous reliability ratings.
3) Size of Key.
4) Speed of node.
I also wouldn't mind ping times to node, current connections to node, etc.
Anyone else out there want to boff up some more suggestions? Perhaps a "Requested items list" could be hammered out and sent to the nice people at http://freenet.sourceforge.net/.
Rami
--
rJames.org - illustration
My girlfriend is starting a new job today. Up until last Friday she worked in an independent record store that is going out of business near a large college campus.
From the stories she's told me, while the recording industry has been doing a fine job of hobbling itself (higher prices, no returns for retailers, clueless/unfriendly/unhelpful store employees, clueless store owners), no small part of the demise is due to students downloading and burning their own CDs. People are ballsy enough to walk up to the counter, ask her for a CD, write down the tracklist, and them mention that they need to get the CD from Napster. Others loudly mention to their friends that there's no need to buy that CD; they'll get get it off the Internet for them.
Last year my girlfriend went to work for the store full-time and it was rare that she'd tell me she had a slow day. Since around March of 2000, that rarity became the norm. A store that on the average went from consistently making a couple of hundred bucks a day went down to $40-$60.
And it's not just her store. There's about 4 independent record stores in the area. The store she worked at is going out of business. The store across the street is not renewing its lease. Another store is going out of business.
Like I said, the recording industry is doing a fine job, largely independent of the Internet, to kill itself. However its practices have been around for awhile. The new variable of Napster and the Internet-at-large is having an impact.
I'm aware that the software is "in beta" (as it has been for months already), but would somebody please tell me whether or not the project has lived up to any of its hype since it first came out? Are there any Freenet developers here who might be able to shed some light on what its current status is? Is there a concrete timeline where it will move from Beta into some semblance of production? Is there any attempt at creating a global list of keys or a search function (for those keys whose authors want them to be public)? The idea itself is incredibly interesting, but I'd like some assurance that for all the hype, we're not looking at another example of vaporware.
First, Freenet is _not_ "in beta". While I know the terms are abused completely, AFAIK "beta" generally means something that is close to being finished / feature complete. Freenet is still in the experimental stage, and likely to stay there for some time. As far as the hype goes, it has certainly lived up to everything that I have hyped it as (an interesting idea with a long way to go). In many ways, the amount of interest in the project amongst the press and geek circles has led to a hyping that has happened completely without the assistance of the actual developers - I don't know how many times I have a crinched after reading "Freenet will save the world" posts here on Slashdot. Of course Freenet is not a panacea, nothing ever is.
And no, there is no timeline for "some semblance of production". It is a free software project, and we are going to continue working on it on the rate we are able and can afford, and hopefully/maybe the day will come when it starts being truely useful. If I were to venture an optimistic guess I would say come back in a year, but don't quote me on that.
Is Freenet vaporware? There have certainly been days when I have been depressed enough by amount of work remains to feel that it actually is. Nothing is for sure in life, and nobody can be sure that Freenet will work as well we would like or even at all. So no, I can't give assurance to contrary, only say that we are working as hard as we can on glimmer of hope that we are really on to something. What more should I be doing for you?
As with most things in life, a balance must be struck or else abuse will run rampant. As I recall vaguely, last year some consumer advocacy (sp?) groups won (or I thought they won) a case against the big record companies, proving that they were overpricing CD's.
From my understanding it cost just pennies to produce a CD, and a few bucks to market it (say, $4-$5 total) Most markup is 50-70% above that so a CD should cost anywhere between $6-$9. Few CD's cost $9, most are in the $15-19 price range. (there are exceptions I know)
I have not seen a significant reduction in the price of CD's, has anyone else?
On to making my point. Until now there has been no counterweight to the high cost of purchasing CD's. Now there is. Just hook up to Napster and get your music for free. Normally you don't download the whole CD, just one or two songs. Napster is the first counterweight to the old business model.
The new economy isn't about technology so much as it's about a companies ability to be dynamic and USE technology to further increse profits. The recording industry, instead of finding new solutions is going back to old tactics (lawyers & courtrooms)
FSP became the protocol du jour for illicit activity (and some legal activity as well) but things changed a bit. It was no longer easy to find sites and they often involved bartering, give me a good piece of software, a good site or a good picture and I'll give you a link to a good site. The BBS scene had this already of course, they often enforced upload to download ratios.
FSP dried up as well (I don't even know if FSP is still around) due to the same pressures as FTP clients. Other peer-to-peer architectures showed up, Hotline and others. They all were self restricting in that it wasn't automatic that you could access copyrighted materials. You had to click banner adds, submit software and agree that you weren't a Fed (har har, has anybody even researched whether a federal agent has to reply truthfuly, especially to a form letter?)
Napster changed this a bit, it was only meant for one thing, and that was to facilitate the exchange of music. It didn't enforce restrictions on what you downloaded and since it wasn't a true P2P, more of a peer to server to peer, it was easy to find what you wanted. The central server handled the searching and host details for you. It was possible to get what you wanted without worrying about keeping up with the scene. It's a tool that the adepts would enjoy using, but didn't have a bar of entry that will keep out the casual users.
I could easily set up my dad with Napster on his Windows box if he were the type of person who listened to music. He probably wouldn't even realize that there were copyright issues involved. It's easy enough and risk free enough that he probably wouldn't care. Most people won't lift a CD out of a record store, the risk is too high and there's a stigma attached to it.
The agencies such as the RIAA are scared, and they should be. Previously they could rob their customers blind since most people really had no comcept of what the value of their products were. With prevalent sharing of music people will realize that the distribution costs are minimal, there will still be some fuzziness on production costs but not enough fuzziness to justify paying over a buck per song.
The present scenario where a bag of money is handed over to the RIAA companies, who grab most of it, then handed down the corporate chain with each successive person getting a smaller and smaller cut until the artist (the person who actually CREATED the music, who had SKILLS that most people do NOT have) gets only a penny or two will have to end. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
Please enter the code at the bottom of page 317 of the liner notes.
My other sig is extremely clever...
See Free Haven for resources on real P2P development.
When a Court orders the shutting off of Napster, it shuts off the server(s) and the system is gone. The judge doesn't have to enter your home to shut down the whole system.
On correct implementations of P2P the court would have to shut down at least N-1 nodes of an N-node network (or break links so that no 2 nodes can talk to each other).
This article pretty much gets the facts right. Unfortunately, it really doesn't matter. The Big Media companies don't want to hear this. They want people to believe that piracy is absolutely rampant on the Internet, that they're losing billions in sales of CDs and DVDs, that record stores are going out of business because of MP3 trading. Because if they can successfully make that case, they can get legislation passed -- like the DMCA -- that gives them more and more control over content and distribution on the internet.
Companies like Bertelsmann and Warner and the rest of the MPAA/RIAA crowd want to turn the internet into yet another passive, advertisement-filled medium. They don't want people - users, consumers, eyeballs - to decide what to send across the net and what is available for viewing or hearing. They want to decide that for you, and make you have to pay for all of it.
And the best way they can do that is to demonize the freedom of the internet, to show that really the consumer is better off if they run everything. So they don't want to believe that Gnutella doesn't work very well, and that Napster isn't hurting sales.
And they don't want you to believe that either.
(cirka 1994)
The Internet works -- just not all that well. And that's good news for BBS and online services like Compuserv and Prodigy.
Mind you, the concept retains its geeky appeal. It's not just the prospect of communicating with anybody you want, phone companies be damned. There's also the techy coolness of the idea -- direct linkages between millions of computers, without the clumsy mediation of some central BBS service. A slick idea, but devilishly hard to execute.
[...]
Keep in mind that the Internet is still under development and bound to get better. But as long as it remains a pure network system, with no central service or company to keep tabs on the network, the Internet will probably never be as slick and efficient as AOL. Which is why Internet style communication may not be quite such an apocalyptic peril after all.
> Napster is not peer-to-peer, it is client-server architecture.
If it's wrong to call Napster p2p, it's equally wrong to call it client-server. Napster is a mix.
Traditional Client-server would be something like FTP - one server, lots of direct connections with clients. Star shaped topology.
Pure p2p is gnutella - god awful topology, connections all over the place, all nodes are "equal".
Napster is a bit of both - client-server for queries and direct communication for transfers. This is an important point, because if Napster was purely client-server, they would be hosting content, and thus clearly would have been shut down a long time ago for holding all those mp3s.
> Free Net and Mojo Nation are P2P.
Doesn't Mojo nation have a central broker for handling Mojo's (ie a bank)? It's just like napster in that sense.
Mike
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
The author of this article has a point.
Peer-to-peer file downloads are still a long way off from being useful in any way.
I'm really curious whether or not people have actually managed to use Freenet in the way it was intended. My own attempts at using the network found that: (a) There are almost no reliable lists of keys/files available. This is important since the network is not searchable. Without a list of keys, Freenet is a useless exercise in creating encrypted data that can never be decrypted. (b) The network is slow to use and even when I attempt to find published keys, they don't work 80% of the time and another 10% of the time it's too slow to be useful.
Thus I get about a 10% success rate in grabbing files from Freenet. This is hardly a good sign.
I'm aware that the software is "in beta" (as it has been for months already), but would somebody please tell me whether or not the project has lived up to any of its hype since it first came out? Are there any Freenet developers here who might be able to shed some light on what its current status is? Is there a concrete timeline where it will move from Beta into some semblance of production? Is there any attempt at creating a global list of keys or a search function (for those keys whose authors want them to be public)? The idea itself is incredibly interesting, but I'd like some assurance that for all the hype, we're not looking at another example of vaporware.
Keep in mind that the entire model only works if people actually *request* the keys. My understanding of the model is that files only move from place to place if they are requested with some regularity. Otherwise they just sit, taking up disk space on somebody's machine, until their lack of use causes them to be overwritten by more important keys. For the moment, all I've seen is hype about this project with very little substance.
I agree we are on the beta version of life with p2p. However, how fast it grows is a dependent on three things.
/. type people are running broadband or Tx, Dx type lines)
The first, as with everything network related is bandwidth, bandwidth, and more bandwidth. Most of the materials being sent around today are large. Correct that VERY large. Most of the connections are small, very small (56k is the upper end, only
The second, is ease of use. The assessment of freenet is accurate. It does have a way to go, but look for it to get there. Dedicated people are working on it and like Gnutella it is growing. Gnutella is much closer, and it is not a stretch for anyone to go to gnutellahosts.com to start the link. Windows update, on-line registration, etc. has gotten people use to this. A little tweak to integration and people would not know it was even happening.
Third and probably the most concerning is the legal issues. ISPs may be protected, but it is only very light gray whether individuals are. It could and will be argued at some point that you allowed your computer to be used for illegal activity.
Will they sue/arrest 9 million Gnutella users? No. Just 10 or 20 really public cases where winning is certain. The worst of the worst which will be used to paint the entire user base as criminal "@ackers", out to steal your files, send you viruses, etc...