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Has P2P Become a Passing Fad?
plasticmillion asks: "As the RIAA launches increasingly rabid attacks against P2P networks and users, pundits continue to debate the future of P2P. On the one hand, some argue that P2P is just a clever way to escape detection from copyright owners, like in this recent Slashdot story. Others, like Clay Shirky, make a strong case that processing is destined to move to the 'edges' of the network. I'm curious to know what Slashdot readers think: is P2P the start of a major new trend that is just getting started, or is it a passing fad that will fade once legal client/server systems for media distribution finally take hold? If the former, which of the supposed advantages of P2P over client/server systems are really significant?"
(As an example, I'd like to see P2P used to maintain collaborative anti-spam blacklists, so that there wouldn't be single-point-of-failure central repositories.)
There comes a time when it moves to the mainstream. Long-term and practical uses for P2P are just now being developed. It's a bit like the internet in general. At first, a few early adopters, then it was everywhere and everything, and now, it's calmed down to a more reasonable level. Instead of edogfoodwithfreeshipping.com, you have real uses for the web and the internet.
2 1337 4 u!
is P2P the start of a major new trend that is just getting started, or is it a passing fad that will fade once legal client/server systems for media distribution finally take hold?
P2P will be around forever, in whatever form it takes through the future's unimaginable technology, for one simple reason:
It's free.
Legal systems for digital media distribution will always cost money. Why pay money when you can get something almost as good -- or as good, with a little know-how -- for free?
The coolest voice ever.
...how are you going to keep them (from) down(loading) on the farm after they've seen the lights of peer-to-peer? Apparently more people use P2P than bothered to vote in the last Presidential election. With that many people engaged in the activity, it's not like it's going to dry up and blow away because the RIAA starts cracking down. Heck, if legal crackdowns ended illicit behavior, we wouldn't have had any booze since the '20s and we wouldn't have a drug problem now.
On the other hand, there's a certain case to be made for the vast majority of those sixty million P2P users being ignorant sheep who can only use P2P in the first place because it's so easy to install the app--and who may not even be aware that they're uploading songs at the same time as they're downloading them, strange as that would seem to a Slashdot reader. And so, even if someone comes up with a totally "safe" method of filesharing, it could lose many of its prospective users if it is even slightly nontrivial to get working properly. (As an example, consider what happened to the mp3 websites after the RIAA's last legal crackdowns...they retreated behind a web of spawning browser windows, porn ads, top ten lists, and so on, until you have to be a hacker just to find where the MP3s actually are.)
So balancing the two questions...I think peer to peer will always be with us, but depending on how easy it is to use, it may lose a lot of its users--and, thus, a lot of potential sources for files.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
I guess when you look at this, the best question is: why are these systems being used now? And the even better question: what are the legal uses of the system now?
My answer is that the best reason to use these right now is to share ideas, music, pictures, etc. with other people, including strangers: things that you own and have the right to redistribute, either because you created it, or you have permission from the creator. Email is used heavily in this fashion, but it has the limit of most providers attempting to make attachments a no-no: either for cost considerations (size); or for the fear of viruses. So, is there a legitimate use? Yes.
Next question would be: what are the usage numbers for these legitimate uses? Well, that one I can't answer too well. My first guess would be that it is a relatively small percentage of the current traffic, with a VERY high figure being around 40%. So, is that enough to keep these things around? Yep.
Okay, so, my conclusion is that P2P serves a useful purpose, outside of the illegal ones. So, the next question becomes, can a commercial solution replace these P2P solutions? That one is really easy - no! There is no way that any organization can afford the freedom that is required in moving these files back in forth. Anyone in IT is quite aware of all the potential dangers to the network, and anyone involved in the whole law side can see how heavily exposed these companies would be if they were allowing viruses, etc. to be damaging customer's systems.
So, ultimate conclusion? Unless they are outlawed, P2P networks are useful, and are likely to remain in existance for a long time.
While P2P may be phased out by newer technologies, its main use - sharing files between users will not stop (a lot of them borderline legal to blatantly illegal). Look at the history of the Internet. First there were Newsgroups, FTP Servers (remember all those no leech policies), Bulletin Boards, Hotline, Napster, Kazaa, Morpheus, etc.
Since the beginning of the Internet people have wanted an easy and anonymous way of trading files. As each technology was foiled by the industry or upgraded by newer technology, one thing had remained constant - The sharing of files online.
That is not a fad - only the technologies supporting it.
P2P will not die just because the RIAA has cracked down on a few people sharing music.
First, let me say that I don't particularly support massive stealing of music - A bit of sharing between friends, sure, but the wholesale infringements we see thanks to the likes of Kazaa, no. That said...
As with virus/worm authors, the RIAA has served a useful purpose, if by reprehensible means. They have demonstrated that P2P has a major flaw that most people do not know about - The model itself does NOT automatically mean anonymity. It just means that no central server exists to shut down, thereby making it all but impossible for any legal action to completely kill. People (can) still have accountability for their actions on a P2P network. Aside from the RIAA's abuse of this fact, we should worry quite a lot more about government use.
So my prediction - P2P services such as Kazaa, that try to track users and transactions, will fade into oblivion. At the same time, those that make every effort to prevent logging, to give plausible deniability, and that use encryption to hide the actual data going over the weak links (anywhere between the first "P" and the second "P"), will gain in popularity. As an obvious current choice, the open-source Freenet does this already, though it has serious problems as far as actually finding what you want goes.
Someone will eventually find a way to make Freenet (or a similar app) more useable, however, without compromising the benefits I mention above. That will replace the current generation of P2P programs, but will itself still count as P2P.
So no, the idea won't die, nor will its use. Implementations will simply become far more sophisticated, and while at each step in the free-information arms race a few people will suffer (as has held true throughout all of history), the rest of us will benefit from their sacrifice.
You're referring to P2P as though it were a particular program or piece of software. This is akin to saying that FTP is lame because you can only download .tar.gz files with it.
The other use of p2p is for mirroring large OSS type files [isos, src, etc] This helps keeping any one server from bearing the brunt of bandwidth. Here though, I think p2p tech could help out if we could get ISPs on board to mirror legal stuff automatically for their users. If I have a 1000 users that all want something , why shouldn't ISP's be caching it to save their own external bandwidth? The problem with that is most content providers still don't "get" caching and mirroring on a local level yet so they scream DMCA everyone tries someting like that, but p2p tech could allow your first local connection to mirror something and still give the originating site credit for ads, hits, etc..
If Kazza or BitTorrent could clean up their act, they could have a really viable business instead of this shady stuff. Perhaps ISPs could have a "check-in" system to verify who's posting and that they can, and host the servers themselves for thier own local users. Once one legal mirror was in the system, everyone could mirror it honestly. It would be all server-side [business people] so that would eliminate much of the illegal activity right there. Sure things might take a day extra to get thru, but hosting for projects would be cheaper. There would be reduced bandwith costs because every iso after the first would be local for the ISP. A Kazza type system could still track all the hits though and scale back the mirrors after the initial "rush".
Justin Frankel knew what he was doing when he made WASTE: On big, open P2P-networks, you never can be sure if happysunshine84 downloading a MP3 from you isn't someone preparing a lawsuit. A closed, WASTE-like network is therefore a better solution, also redusing the noise (spam, renames, clients modified to not upload, etc) you usually see from the typical P2P networks.
I never tried WASTE, as I never got the thing to work under Linux, but as I understand it, I can have e.g. have one network with 10 co-workers and another one with my friends. If I share the files I download from both groups, I will be a link between those two networks. Now, if also my co-workers and friends are on more than one network, fresh files will always be pouring in (If these guys are nice and share what they download).
Quality-filtered content where no-one from the outside can know what you are doing, what else can you wish for?That is, besides a Linux client
I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
P2P for media distribution has been around since the very beginning of radio and television. It's called the "affiliate" model. P2P networks based on "affiliate" nodes (not unlike Kazaa supernodes) have been around for several years, and are likely to have a prominent place.
The client/server model is inefficient for media distribution. Trusting consumer nodes for distribution is relatively insecure, but more importantly, consumers won't want to pay the bandwidth fees that ISPs will likely charge if consumer nodes go critical mass (I would argue that--even with Kazaa out there--critical mass has not yet been achieved).
Prediction: Microsoft will be on the settop, and the dominant P2P media distribution network will be through proprietary, DRM-managed, Microsoft-run networks. Microsoft WILL NOT LOSE in this game -- they are betting the company on it. Their trojan horse is XBOX.
The RIAA will go after the owner of the proxy
As long as porn exists, P2P will exist (with or without copyrighted music and movies).
I do not expect porn companies to sue individual users for IP material.
Oh, and compact discs. I mean, 650 MB of read-only data? C'mon, that's more worthless than 8-track tapes!
Or maybe it is a fad like bell-bottoms. They go out for a while, then come back in the 24th century as part of Starfleet uniforms! Quick, everyone go check the ST Encyclopedia and see if it mentions P2P!
All joking aside, to use a trite but true statement, I think the genie is out of the bottle, cat's out of the bag, etc. The only people that think P2P is a fad are probably the people that want it to be a fad.
P2P will likely usher in new business models, and new ways of getting entertainment. The RIAA/MPAA clinging to the old ways would be, as some have pointed out, not unlike the makers of horse-drawn carriages trying to stop the production of the automobile.
Change happens. People don't usually like it, but are capable of adjusting. Corporations are not people (despite what the law may say) and simply refuse to adjust to change unless they can see an obvious, and instant, financial gain.
Technology often makes current systems obsolete. For example, gunpowder pretty much made the feudal system of government obsolete. In the future, an invention like matter transporters (beam me up!) would probably make our current governments obsolete.
P2P is making the way we purchase, oh I'm sorry, "consume" entertainment obsolete. I highly doubt the RIAA/MPAA can cripple technology enough to keep us all in the old days.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
All P2P really does at a technical level is build a rather randomly distributed system of mirrors for the distribution of content. That's nice, but without a central starting point there's no facility for the updating, refreshing, or retracting of content.
:)
High traffic websites have been doing mirroring for a long time, and Alakami's business is based on putting mirroring servers exactly where they belong... as close to upstream of the users as possible for the content that will be repeatedly requested. Caching proxy servers can also be used on the corperate/ISP side of things to get the same effect.
The only real use of the mainstream P2P clients is to obsficate the originator of a file by creating thousands of sites offering that file... basically an "I am Spartacus... I am Spartacus... I am Spartacus... I am Spartacus... " scene for anybody trying to figure out where the file started. As we've seen in today's other P2P thread, the most popular P2P content is done in a way where the "leaker" doesn't wish to be identified.
BitTorrent is the only major P2P protocol that ensures what you're getting is what you meant it to be... basically that the content has been "signed" by its originator who needs some help on the bandwidth costs and many supporters of the sender are working together to provide it. For other content that's meant to be distributed, you have to step outside of the protocol to get the MD5 hash to make sure you got what you thought you got and not a virus... which effectively does the same thing. When somebody tries to distrubute a virus-tainted Linux on a website, they're sure to get shutdown by their ISP if not worse, because to run a website you've gotta tell other people who you are and stand behind the content you post. Not so on P2P, which is why it's such a popular way to send out viruses.
P2P as a distribution model has some limited merits, but "P2P" as an avoid-paying-"the man" system is a fad that'll die out has soon as "the man" reminds people that crime doesn't pay. The correct way to use P2P, which I'm sure will come out in time, is as too to beat "the man" at his own game. It'd be nice if a site with large-ammounts of open source fans (such as this one) would hold a musical talent contest where instead of locking the winner into an RIAA-label deal, the winner is given access to a recording studio and experts to help them to record their music, a personally-promotional infomercial (even if it has to be on TechTV) with which they introduce themselves, sing a few songs, and pitch tickets for a multi-city upcoming tour, and a high-bandwidth site from OSDN where they must post unprotected Ogg Vorbis and MP3 files of the songs they recorded with the prize. Their share of the ticket sales from the tour is the only prize money they get, but that should be more than enough for them.
As long as there is copyrighted stuff that people want, you can easily assume...
1) Consumers/cheap bastards will rapidly embrace the latest P2P fad.
2) Others (RIAA, MPAA, etc.) will do whatever it takes to bring it down
The idea is here to stay, but its implementation will be likely a never-ending game of Whack-A-Mole... Take out Napster, up pops Kazaa/Grokster, etc.
The solution is OBVIOUSLY for companies to start putting out things that nobody really wants (and therefore won't be distributed). But there may be a slight flaw in my theory, as N Sync is quite popular on P2P networks. Go figure!
I'm curious to know what Slashdot readers think: is P2P the start of a major new trend that is just getting started, or is it a passing fad that will fade once legal client/server systems for media distribution finally take hold? If the former, which of the supposed advantages of P2P over client/server systems are really significant?
.torrent files?
I believe p2p is the future. Copyright issues aside, I doubt I'm the only one that's noticed that there are some downloads that are getting extremely large. Maybe it's a game demo, a movie trailer, or a software upgrade. How often has it happened that some thing comes out like, say, a Matrix trailer or a new game mod and people swamp the main server and mirrors alike to download it? Why else would recent Slashdot articles on popular downloads be linking
The problem is further escalated by the fact that the ranks of broadband users are growning every day. I hear that Verizon is wanting to dump somewhere around 11 billion dollars into their network to ensure that all of their customers are able to get DSL, and they have lowered their prices across the board...You can now get 1.5 down/128 up for a flat $30/mo, similar to what SBC's been offering. With all this broadband around, popular web sites will not be able to keep up, expecially if they have downloadable goodies. The answer is distributed computing. p2p represents the infancy of the inevitibility of distributed storage, processing, and bandwidth.
-R
"The Achilles Heel of Bittorrent is that it can only transfer one file at a time, and the only way to download multiple files is to open multiple instances of Bittorrent, which drains upload speed, a precious commodity among home broadband users. Some work [kefro.st] is being done towards this goal but it currently deals with upload rates for individual downloads, and doesn't manage multiple downloads."
Try BT++ or Burst! both of which, I believe, can do all of this.
Artists throughout time have never been rich and their works never worth much until they were dead. Yet we still had great art. But with the RIAA, we get crap and all the good music is stiffeled by Payola.
Come on how much is music really worth?
they are attempting to destroy free speech.
This has absolutely nothing to do with free speech. Illegally copied music, porn, warez are protected speech? Jeezus christ.
"This has absolutely nothing to do with free speech. Illegally copied music, porn, warez are protected speech? Jeezus christ."
There is a fundamental right acknowledged by the First Amendemnt to speek and be heard by willing listeners. This is the only fundamental right involved here at all. All the other rights are at best a limited commercial right.
Now, please tell me how to distingush a file which is someone's free speech from a file which is someone's copyright protected work.
Mind you, I'm not interested in my right as a listener here. If I as a listener am put out and have to go hunting for something I'm not going to do it, and it is the speaker's right which is infringed.
Big Brother Bush is doubleplus ungood.
Now, give people free content without restrictions and you have something that everyone wants. Why are search engines the most popular websites? because the user types in what they want and gets it. From a users point of view, kazaa is the same as google except you can get everything that you cant get on google - its like the too hot for google channel. Are you seriously telling me that people dont want to be able to download all the music, films, porn, software, games, books and southpark they want for free!?!?! get real!
The only things that might kill p2p filesharing as we know it are:
Governments (well in the UK anyway) are pushing broadband for all sorts of PHB reasons like "education" and obviously the ISPs - AOL etc are gonna try and sell it. Sen. Hollings is even for it. The absolute irony here is that the very same people who are pushing broadband so they can sell content are the same ones who will be fucked out of their money by filesharing! its brilliant, serves them right for their evil DRM plans.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Free speech protects YOUR speech, not media files you copied of OTHER people's speech. Is it really that hard to make the distinction between protecting the right to speak your thoughts as opposed to wholesale copying of other people's works?
Today every surfer *could* be tracked, every download *could* be traced back, every chat *could* be deanonymized.
The industry and the government is more and more making use of this fact, so it is - to my mind - very important to move to technologies where everyone can stay in anonymity.
Please, don't tell me "I have nothing to hide". This 12 year old girl that now has to pay $2000.- for sharing songs also thought she had nothing to hide. People who linked to "FTP-Explorer" in their homepages also thought they had nothing to hide. In todays world a single person without a company backing him up can never know what's copyrighted and what not.
Moreover privacy is a basic right of every human being. Hopefully people will recognize this right.
Technologies that do not rely on single controllable servers seem to be the only solution; P2P is such software. Still, anonymity is missing because no one bothers. Hopefully these subpoenas of the RIAA will push secure technology like freenet or gnunet.
We will see.