EFF Seeks Examples Of Legit P2P Use

Electronic Frontier Foundation writes: "EFF is gathering real world examples of actual non-infringing uses of file sharing systems. We've heard about people using these systems to trade medical records, resumes, songs authorized by the author, etc. We need proof of these actions-- the kind of proof we could, if needed, introduce as evidence in court. Notes like "my friend Fred used Gnutella for his resume" are not helpful. Notes like "Intel is sponsoring P2P cancer research . Go to www.fool.intel.com or contact cancerresearch2intel.com" or "I uploaded my songs and have received positive messages from others who've listened to them" are helpful. Points awarded for clarity, brevity and simplicity. Demerits applied for examples your grandmother wouldn't understand and your mom would find offensive. Please email examples to p2p@eff.org. Thanks for your help." It's a sad state of things when you've got to prove that something is good in order that it not be presumed harmful. "This hammer could be used for dangerous purposes -- can you prove there are good uses for it?" Sigh.

Comments

Distributed annotation system for genome databases

[Anonymous Coward]

I'mnot sure if this is truly P2P but it is probably close enough (and was to a certain extent inspired by Napster)

background
The major biological databases (EMBL, GenBank, Swissprot etc.) are repositories for sequence data, the information that describes the order of the DNA or proteins (depending on the database). This is collected and curated by a relatively small number of people compared to the size of these databases.

This information is relatively useless without annotation. Annotation is the description of the biological role of the sequence and which bits are important. Unfortunately annotation is difficult and time consuming for people who are non experts to maintain. THis means that many of the entries in the databases are either poorly annotated (poor), have out of date annotation (poor) or blatently incorrect annotation (really bad).

A system of P2P sharing of annotation data has been devised where an expert working on gene Xyz can make available his own annotations without having to burden the overworked people at GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ to make updates to the central database. Interested parties can access this data in a P2P manner (ie a query on 'what does anyone know about Xyz').

One of the main protagonists of DAS (Distributed Annotation System) is Lincoln Stein at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (yes, of CGI.pm fame). It will also be presented at the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference in July this year (where I hope to find out a lot more about it too..)

This sounds like a perfect example of productive P2P.Have a look at http://stein.cshl.org/das/ for more information. I know that at least one of the authors on the paper referenced has been guilty of reading Slashdot in the past so maybe he would comment.

..d

I Share Debian GNU/Linux Packages on Gnutellanet

[Brian Ristuccia]

I share my recently created or downloaded packages for Debian GNU/Linux on gnutellanet. Redistribution is always authorized by the copyright proprietor. I'm also working on an enhancement for apt that will enable it to download packages from gnutellanet and share recently downloaded packages. (I'm also carefully following developments in Debian that will eventually lead to cryptographic signatures on packages in order to reduce the risk of a rogue package being inadvertantly installed).

Say that again?

[roystgnr]

It's hard to argue airplanes are inherently dangerous to people

I think it would be really easy to argue, actually. Look up the accident statistics yourself. It's still safer than driving... but would we have known that (or believed it) before public air travel became popular?

But some of us feel that all this is irrelevant, that you shouldn't need to be sponsored by a noble cause (TM) to write or use a computer program!

Repeat after me: "My life is my own. I do not need to justify my life to others." You especially don't need to dredge up something like cancer research to justify the existance of an entire class of computer programs to, of all plaintiffs, the entertainment industry!!!

Legit Peer-to-Peer? Its called "The Internet"

[arcade]

The entire Internet is built around the Peer-to-Peer principble. Of course, firewalls & NAT-devices break this principle all the time - but basically - Internet _is_ a peer-to-peer network.

Some peers are called 'servers' since they contain more data and serve more people than others. Still, they are just peers.

But, to get real examples. IRC-Botnets - the bots are connected to eachother, and talk to eachother. They maintain stability on IRC channels, or perform other functions.

Another example, the good old fashioned 'talk' program is a nice peer-to-peer thingomajig.


--

If flying was illegal...

[nyet]

.. and you wanted to prove airplanes were useful, would you find ways to use the airplane on the ground?

I think not.

P2P blows the top off of what the conventional wisdom of intellectual property says, and THAT is why there is a debate to begin with.

Re:If flying was illegal...

[nyet]

Airplanes are inherently dangerous to railroad companies. Roll back the clock a few decades before cheap air travel. If Mr. Railroad Tycoon was suddenly faced with a flottilla of 747s prepped and ready to take passengers to/from EVERY point on earth, you can BET he would spend every dollar trying to prove that 1) it was dangerous and 2) it would cause him to lose money, thereby affecting the economy. After all, the railroads WERE the US economy for several decades. Follow the money, my son. Follow the money, and there you will find enlightenment.

I host my guttenburg books on gnutella

[pcx]

I host my Project Guttenburg E-Books on Gnutella as well as many shareware and freeware games spanning all the way back to the early 1980s. To my knowledge I do not have one single copyright violation in my shared folder.

P2P doesn't need evidence. Internet *is* P2P

[Baki]

What is P2P? It just means any connected node (called host) on the Internet can connect another one, without one system explicitly meant to be a server only, and the other one a client.

What is so special about that, why all the fuzz? Even the notion of defending P2P makes me sick and is absurd. The Internet is built on (mostly) the TCP protoco, which allows for any node to connect to any other node directly. The Internet *is* P2P and has been so from the beginning.

It is normal to telnet from machine A to machine B, and then telnet back from B to A. It is normal to act both as an ftp client and server, in fact before the web became popular, in the old days, almost any connected node to the Internet acted both as client and as server.

Why is this "evidence" needed? People trying to forbid P2P are trying to forbid Internet, or at least trying to fundamentally change its netowork protocol (which is impossible).

Only ISP's could block incoming connections, thus making "P2P" (how I hate that word, describing something that has been around for ages as if it were something new) impossible. Not many of them do (luckily), only having no fixed IP address makes acting as a server a bit more complicated, but things like dyndns get around that.

One might imagine a future where anyone with a dynamic IP address (hard to trace) is prohibited by the state to have incoming connections. That is a nightmare but I don't think such a draconic law is very probably, and it would be very hard to enforce too.

Why it is different

[andrewmuck]

P2P is not centralised, this is different from almost all comercial models of selling content.

Centralised content distribution lends itself to censorship and control.

P2P ensures free speech. It is the modern equivelant of word of mouth.

In this climate of mass-consumerisim and mass-media word of mouth is something that the next generation is mostly ignorant of.

a valid example of P2P is freenet. Freedom of speech is legitimate. Some things need to be said.

Re:I see no honestly persuasive case for P2P

[Caterbro]

you have got to be kidding. file sharing is the greatest thing since sliced bread and floating soap. using it takes advantage of the massive connectivity now available without needing to host your crap on somebody else server's, effectively increasing the scale and ability of any user to disseminate their ideas and knowledge. it ensures that nobody need be held hostage to material and resources they might not have access to or want to compromise them with.

its the new USENET, only without the god-like whimsy of sysadmnins. I have a great deal of trouble beleiving you can see "no honestly persuasive case for" a system of file sharing that allows unfettered access to just about anything anyone might care to make available, without constraint and without fear of arbitrary caprice, TOS and the like.

what could be better? what could be more effective, more populist, more empowering, on the internet?

the IP issue seems to be a vanishingly small issue in the face of those benefits. let the poperty holders look to their wallets, and not to our hands- it has ben ever thus.

SMB file systems on Windows are peer to peer

[x-empt]

Microsoft has stated on numerous occasions that SMB on Win9x (and NT) is a peer-to-peer based system when the machine is not part of a Windows NT domain.

SMB on windows is used as both a server and client. SMB is used to share files among linux systems and windows computers.
SMB is indeed a peer-to-peer system of sharing legitimate data. Many business offices, schools, and government use SMB to share files. Why don't we use RIAA as a good example of someone using peer-to-peer to share their MS Word documents about the trial on their lan?

:)

telephone

[SubtleNuance]

The telephone.

Each phone both sends and receives data.

Wow - the US is spinning in a sea of shitte. Is P2P on trial now...?

An idea to capitalize on P2P

[abe ferlman]

So, I have this idea, and I think it's pretty good. If I had the time, I'd do it myself, but maybe someone else will pick it up and run with it.

Here goes. What does p2p get you? Free distribution. What do you lose? Centralized control. So the materials best suited for distribution over a p2p network are 1. things you want as widely disseminated as possible and 2. things that don't have to be constantly updated and revised.

My idea, basically, is to use napster/gnutella as a publishing medium for original content that is specifically designed for p2p. If this works, you can distribute a reasonably large file over a very large network in a very short period of time, and here's the kicker- if your stuff gets popular, you don't have to pay out big bucks for akamai and better server hardware.

So what kind of content would fly? I think sketch comedy that gets updated daily would be ok, or better yet, a comedic news program. I love reading Suck.com on my palm pilot on the train every morning, I wish someone would do a Not Necessarily the News style 5-10minute news bit every morning and distribute it over napster/gnutella with a predictable filename (maybe newsTellaDDMMYY.mp3 or something like that). Eventually you could get sponsors and integrate little ads into your content, or maybe you'd spark a phenomenon and some radio network would pick you up or something, or maybe even just sell archives of your work on cdrom or something. But it seems like the way to really capitalize on the medium is to take advantage of the fact that a public media distribution network has been made available to you. It's not the web, it's not tv, and promoting your stuff i nthis media doesn't work the same way it does in these other media. If you publicise the fact that you're doing it and update consistently and often, and actually produce some funny/interesting content, I think you'd be onto something really big. Let me know how it goes if you try it.

Bryguy

Does the new Cheese Worm count?

[karma kameleon]

It's, um, sort of a peer-to-peer technology, since it automatically propogates itself through my peer Linux networks, and fixes the unsecured installations in the process.

In fact, I, er, use it to maintain all my network installations. Yeah, that's the ticket... it has saved me mucho time and frustration.