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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!
In that new environment, P2P will rise again. Instead of wasting resources on hiding from the law, the true potential will be realized. Napster was much more elegant than Gnutella.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
especially for legal content... bitTorrent has made it so that you can get all sorts of legal content like game demos, linux distros, etc. off p2p without having to be on horribly slow ftp servers.
while my thoughts were busy hatchin' If I only had a 'brain...
The cases that the RIAA are pushing will define it's "fad" status... if swapping music over p2p apps turns out to be a practice that is out of the reaches of the law then we should guess that the practice will be here to stay.
P2P is not used just for piracy. P2P is used to download the latest Linux kernel, the Matrix preview when the official site was slashdotted, etc. It might stop having millions of users downloading copyrighted stuff, but it will always exist, and will be extremely useful to a lot of people involved in legal activities.
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.
One thing which I think is interesting is that recently, VOIP over P2P was mentioned. Of course, you don't have to be kreskin to see that some form of legal online music purchasing has to eventually become legal. However, I think that the recent mention of VOIP over P2P shows that the technologies made for decentralised P2P will still be used, just not for the purposes that are currently used for.
P2P is not going anywhere. The old media companies just have to come up with a new business model. Thus far their business model is 'sue the hell out of everyone'.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Forget the copyright issue; P2P is too inefficient for those who have to pay for bandwidth.
...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
Researchers, for instance, could benefit from a P2P network to distribute academic work. In general, it would be well suited for swapping data in any community which actively encourages that kind of sharing, and which could enjoy increased efficiency by cutting out middlemen (e.g. academic journals).
There is no one way of doing things, but many ways in which some ways are better than others dependant upon what one is doing. And it is by having many different ways of doing things that different things are discovered or innovated.
So of course P2P is here to stay, but the RIAA, that' a different story, one of the old fighting to not move out of the way of then new and innovative.
As a Windows user (I know, I know), I can't tell you how many times I wished I could find a simple DLL or INI file from a user whose [insert name of utility or program here] was working when mine was not.
I suppose the same could apply to Linux scripts if not for concerns over security.
William
When you're not looking, this sig is in Latin.
First, no matter how much pressure media giants put on copyright infringers that use P2P software to swap their music/movies/etc., these users will always find a way to continue trade the media. Even if the communities are reduced to using something like freenet, that group of people will always be there (yes, I know that there are many legal and encouraging uses for services like Kazaa, but the majority of users are downloading and serving music they have not bought legally).
Second, there are many uses for P2P not yet explored and invented. P2P became very popular around 2000 because of Napster, but file sharing is just the tip of the iceburg. Scientific computers across a P2P network can share computing power.
P2P is here to stay. In what form is not quite clear. It will obviously evolve and transform with the computing/Internet climate, but with bandwidth always becoming cheaper, I cannot see P2P going away.
empower individuals, in a network effect
the telephone, the automobile (highways), the printing press, etc.
p2p is never going away, it's just revving up
"illegal" will not be beaten, it's just a giant game of technological whack-a-mole
napster was centralized, so they beheaded it
kazaa was transparent, so they went after the nodes
the next killer p2p filesharing app will hide user identities, and the monopolies and cartels of intellectual property will wage war against these systems via other means
ad nauseum whack-a-mole
p2p file-sharing is the future, it is never going away, it has captured the imagination of the average internet user the way the internet itself did in the early '90s
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Just like Data processing was considered a passing fad in the 1970s. After all, things are going from a community-based system to people working ISOLATED BY THEMSELVES.
/sarcasm
For instance, there is something new out there called the INTRA-web. Rather than connect to the OUTSIDE world in an attempt to get information, you simply search your own hard drive.
Analysts predict that someday in the future, people will have no further need to ever be connected again, and people will live in isolated padded cells, not talking or communicating to anything at all, simply staring at the ceiling.
IAALS.
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.
Have computers had their day?
Are the days of gravity over?
Is the sun about to cool?
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
Plus it's patent free.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
People have always stolen stuff(and will probably continue to indefinitely). If anyone can list a society that had no theft, I will be surprised. Greed is just too common among humans. I believe that it is probable that the RIAA will make use of some P2P networks nearly impossible. However, it will be back. How long will it be before secure large-scale p2p networks come along? No matter how little they end up charging for something, there will be people unwilling or unable to pay for it. Has anyone ever quizzed the general public(or even /. users) about this? that might be a good idea.
OK, I think I strayed from the topic a little. Anyways, so i've shown that peoiple will always steal. p2p networks just happen to be one of the best, hardest to stop ways to do so. i can't think of a much better method. so, p2p is here to stay
"73% of quotes on the Internet are made up" -Ben Franklin
I think p2p is here to stay, and there are still features that need to be put in place univerally before it's mature, and all the various p2p flavors are comparable.
The various bits are there scattered across different p2p networks. IMNSHO, all p2p networks/clients ought to have:
-Swarming (as defined/used in BitTorrent)
-Privacy/anonymity (perhaps as much as in Freenet)
-Good searching (Kazaa, Napster, those types. With room for improvement all around)
-Open-source clients with no ads/spyware
-Decentralized/self-organizing networks (no central point of failure, or at least minimal)
-Browser/web server hooks to autoswarm web content (there ought to be bittorrent:// links)
Pardon my BitTorrent bias. I moderate the bittorrent_help mailing list, so I have more exposure to that.
All these features should someday be pushed into numerous language libraries, so that they become ubiquitous.
What about FurthurNET? Legal P2P appears way under-reported by the media. Perhaps it's because it isn't as sexy as all the geeks and kiddies 'breakin the law' and stealing music.
P2P has never been about breaking copyrights. Had Napster not come along, P2P would have moved along without it just fine. The legitimate purposes of P2P will not be damaged. The illegal purposes of P2P might be destroyed, but the core technology that allowed it will continue.
Since the P2P acronymn has been improperly linked to illegal activities (copyrighted materials sharing). Maybe we should get a new one (Colabarative Resource Sharing CRS, or maybe computer resources Co-op CRC)
Seems to me that there's quite a bit of confusion what peer-to-peer really is...
In academic environments, P2P is commonly defined as having one or more of these characteristics:
1. Peers should be able to freely offer services to other peers.
2. The addressing system should be independent of lower layer network addressing systems.
3. Peers should be assumed to be of variable connectivity.
Yes, this means that even some partly centralized systems are peer-to-peer. Like distributed computing and instant messaging. P2P is clearly beyond just file sharing, and it has been used for ages.
Boeing, Texas Instruments, Sun, Verizon... the list goes on and on. P2P is everywhere and it is not being used for file swapping.
Correct link: furthurnet.com. Remember kiddies, preview posts *first*. :)
I watched that deal on TechTV last week, where they had the industry and P2P guys arguing about the future.
They boiled down the debate to this: RIAA side: "Artists deserve to get paid", P2P side: "Promising new technology can greatly increase blah blah".
It was completely disingenuous. Artists dont make shit through the distributors, and KaZaa/iTunes/Rhapsody are hardly necessary to obtain music.
What it really was, was a pissing contest between two sets of non-talen beurocrats to see who gets to be the middleman of the future.
Facts are, we need no middleman. We need KaZaa just as much as we need the RIAA. We can get music straight from the performers, most of whom will gladly offer it up for free to get us into a seat at their next concert. If some band thinks their shit is worth a buck a pop, go ahead, but I probably wont pay.
Just mp3s on the bands website, that's all. Google will be all the search engine needed.
Fuck RIAA, fuck P2P, and shut up now I'm sick of hearing from all these jackasses who've done nothing to entertain me, yet feel they deserve a percentage of my entertainment dollar.
All thats needed is performers (including necessary technical folk, mixers and whatnot) and audiences.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
p2p filesharing may yet be squashed by the RIAA's evil henchmen - this is an argument that will probably, in the short term at least, be settled by cash. However, it seems that p2p itself - the move away from the little client, great big server, towards lots of modestly proportioned servents - is unavoidable. Fact is, most people have more computing power/storage space/network bandwidth than they really need; p2p often makes better use of the resources that are available. Unless there is a really radical shift in the hardware market (super thin clients maybe ?) I think p2p will be here to stay.
p2p sharing is nothing new. It's just the old client/server with a new name, only everyone is a server.
Now, *distributed* filesharing, like bitTorrent and or Kazaa/Morpheus... that's new. And *that* is here to stay; it's equivalent to switching from circuit-switched networking to packet-switched networking, only with files rather than messages.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
What's a fad, is the pirated use of P2P apps. I started up Filerush.com (which is bit torrent heavy) because I felt all icky-gooey using illegal sites like suprnova to spread the game and movie files for my gaming web site. P2P has empowered even the smaller web sites like mine and gave me, almost overnight, as much as 6-10 percent of the total download numbers of some of my nearest competitors like Fileshack on popular new files. Smiling ear to ear. Akamai in a box is here to stay in my opinion.
I personally think we are just seeing the tip of the proverbial iceberg for p2p.. a lot of companies would love to be able to use processing power of millions of computers (i.e. what kazaa did with their leech-ware product) .. Seti@home has proved that people are willing to donate computer time and energy, I mean, look at the battles that rage over the number one through ten slots at seti. (people even trying to cheat). I think you will start seeing p2p system for searching, archival and scientific pop up all over in the next few years. In addition, games like Everquest and Lineage pass off most of the processing to the client computers, so in effect it is a large p2p network (albeit obviously not so, but you get my drift).
Anyway, there are a lot of things that p2p is good for (besides the obvious pirate-ware).
And there are ways around it as well for pirates.
i.e. here is an idea:
yenc a file and split it, store various chunks of it hidden within html on freehosting around the globe, you could easily write a script that would put everything back together and un-yencode the file to it's original state. If this was done on a massive scale you could have release groups dropping rebuild files instead of actual files. What would happen then? (especially if redundancy was part of the system). That is one alternative to what is currently being done. I think right now the RIAA is just doing the fly-swatting routine and p2p is just the one they are currently after, next it will be IRC and IM servies..
Anyway, yes.. p2p will be here for a long time to come.
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
When I think of all the millions I've saved.
I use P2P every day, whether it be ftp, SAMBA, Gnutella, or some other concoction. And I don't ever use it to download RIAA crap.
...just my 2 gil.
What pundits fail to realize is that P2P is not a class of applications; it is simply a form of distributed computing architecture in which nodes act as both client and server.
The term P2P is, however, a passing fad. It is a label for this architecture whose greatest association is with a class of applications designed to steal intellectual property from others. It is unfortunate that this association has come about. However, the architecture will outlive the fad.
Not to be insensitive, but please read some of the other posts I've seen referring to the real facts of the case. I am sorry your wife was recently laid off. That sucks. But to blame illegal sharing of music is wrong. Your industry is still making a hell of a lot of money. The profit margins are not significantly changed by the advent of these P2P networks. The issue that is brought up by these networks is copyright, and they serve as notice that the music labels need to reorganize their business models. They can make money in an industry where piracy is rampant, WITHOUT alienating the consumer (and some have). Please do some more research on this issue, and DO NOT compare file sharing with drugs. That's just silly.
Shhhhhh, you damnfool, you'll put them onto us!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Sure, most of the stuff there now is there despite the copyright owner, but as copyright crumbles P2P will be the way to become known. Indie bands jumped onto P2P as soon as they realized it was a way to get their stuff out there where people might find it.
Big Brother Bush is doubleplus ungood.
with more bandwidth and faster processors, people will devise better and better ways of sharing files with or without a central server. i am particularly fascinated with the concept of decentralized networks, like gnutella; though obviously gnutella leaves much to be desired. i am positive that it is possible for a decentralized network to operate *almost* as well as the traditional server/client model, though it'll be a lot more work to make it happen. someone will do it (i'm trying, but who knows how that'll turn out ;)
Yes. You can call is "GodZa". Or "Godster".
Invisible, undetectable. And you can't interact with it. But, you can ask it all the questions you want. We'll all feel better just by thinking that we know it's there.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
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.
with google. Then its just part of the existing infrastructure.
Quack, quack.
...nor should it. P2P is a legal means for easy distribution of large audio/video filesets... see:
FurthurNet.com, musicfreaks.net, and etree.org list of legal Bittorrent download sites.
The clients share the load, and there's no more leechers. What's not to love?
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.
we have a very good example fo the power of p2p in our own backyard..
what is it? No matter if its called free source or open source its the same power to edgge amoung many peers tha tproduces more power than the whole of its sum of its parts
Don't Tread on OpenSource
There is a P2P client (I can't remember the name now, but it was written in Java) that polls a list of available live recordings that tape traders have made available in either FLAC or Shorten format (as well as MP3 and Ogg Vorbis)... I was using it to see if anyone had a live recording of Guster's latest concert in Portland, Oregon (at the Crystal Ballroom... the concert with Maroon 5 rocked).
On the other hand we see how the traditional client/server system can break down if it has a significant user base and not enough bandwidth. The new Steam client hasn't allowed me to connect to a game since I installed it six hours ago. Who knows how much more data could have been transferred if all the Steam users were connected to each other and sharing their cache through a P2P network?
The next step in P2P would be to combine the swarm downloading of Bittorrent with a persistent P2P network like Edonkey2000. 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 is being done towards this goal but it currently deals with upload rates for individual downloads, and doesn't manage multiple downloads.
P2P is definitely the future, and I predict its popularity will continue to rise as more consumers sign up for broadband and start sucking down large media files like full albums and movies from corporate sites who aren't prepared for the broadband explosion.
P2P is here to stay and it will have a dramatic effect on the entertainment industry.
http://www.nonesuch.org/p2prevolution.pdf
In a few years when my broadband is 10 times as fast and I have 10 times as much storage and I can download directly to my Tivo, why would I bother watching ad-ridden TV shows or go to sticky movie theaters?
AC comments get piped to
well the P2P with legal uses like BitTorrent. Doom III will use a P2P system although why they designed a system like that again is beyond me, I happen to like the client server system that supports many more players, hopefully it will be brought back again. However whether or not the illegal P2P survives is dependent on the if the RIAA survives.
Imagine a P2P system like Kazaa but with one extra twist...Whenever
someone wants to download a file from you, your computer doesn't send
it directly to theirs. Instead your computer sends the file to a proxy
machine which then sends the file to the rceipient. Both connections
are encrypted with public-key cryptography, and the proxy machine
stores nothing that is not encrypted. Congratulations, you have just
send a file to anyone (maybe even an RIAA spy) without then
interacting with you and finding out what your IP address is or who
you are.
Now imagine that in addition to super-peers, Kazaa maintains a list of
proxy servers whose sole job is to upload stuff from users and
download stuff to other users. You can run such a 'data peer' yourself
legelly since all the data is encrypted so you don't know what your
computer is storing.
Of course this network is less efficient than Kazaa, since each file
gets copied twice whenever it is downloaded. I guess that's why
nothing like this network exists yet. But if Kazaa dies due to its
users being sued off the network, I'll bet this 'proxy'-based network
takes over. Let the RIAA try to sue users on this proxy network!
Anyone interested in helping build this?
Practice Kind Randomness and Beautiful Acts of Nonsense.
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".
Swapping music and videos was the fad. The technology is never the fad, it is what you can do with it that drvies popularity.
I was using P2P back when it was called IRC channels with a bunch of guys running FTP servers. Before that, I was into the type of P2P that was traded in wierd locations throughout Compuserve. Before that, we called the Bleeding Edge and other local BBS's and spent hours uploading gif files to their public areas. Before then, it was floppies and a copy of Renegade, and casette tapes with holes drilled in them.
Now, I've gone off the searchable networked P2P, and on to sending secret web links to people I meet over IRC. Napster, Kazaa, they just simplify and dehumanize the interaction. The ways that used to work -- hunting down generous people with loose morals and begging them for files -- still work just as well. As does sneakernet and a stack of discs. I've had file sharing "parties" in the past year...grandiose events where three friends come over with a couple cool CDs and we trade them.
Ironically, I don't trade files much at all. Not because I am afraid of the RIAA, but because most of what I want to listen to nowadays is off the major lables that are members of the RIAA and I want to support them. I had to seriously hunt for CDs from bands like Jiker, Valis, Edan (the humble magnificent) and the Black Keys. These same bands are all over the P2P networks. When your music distribution system is so screwed up that it is EASY to steal music but nearly impossible to BUY it...you've got big problems. Maybe an answer is to shut down p2p. Maybe a better answer is finding some way to reach the millions of listeners who don't want to hear Madonna's robotic warbling.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Sounds like a bunch of propaganda to me. Everyone looks for a sap to pin things on, and I'm sure record labels' troubles don't have anything to do with mass amounts of terrible music, combined with overpriced CDs. Sorry for your loss, but I can't believe you compare music piracy to pot... There aren't even words to express my state of stupor.
I mean, what's the point of living...if you don't have a dick?
Pirate 2 Pirate? Oh, now I am disappointed.
I think it's important to point out that P2P as a network architecture will NOT die. It'd be silly if a P2P would die off because the RIAA is suing people that use this type of network. Using P2P to swap illegal songs may or may not survive.
There are many advantages to using decentralized networks like P2P. It distributes your resources so you don't have all eggs in one basket. Things like denial of service attacks could become obsolete on a decentralized network.
Now as far as music swapping is concerned, I also doubt that it will die off because of the lawsuits. I think it's more likely for this to become a digital arms race, where developers make better, secure, anonymous P2P networks, while the RIAA has to find better ways of tracking people or using new technologies to prevent music copying (ie DRM).
I think a likely scenario is that mainstream P2P networks may shut down because of the RIAA lawsuits (like Napster), but the techno elite will use more advanced P2P applications like freenet which is an anonymous network. The techno elite are those who like using bleeding edge technology and are the early adopters.
And the cycle continues, friends of the techno elite sees freenet and think the concept is neat, and starts joining the bandwagon. At first, no one notices, until the mainstream users all jump onto freenet. RIAA notices, and cycle repeats again. Digital arms race.
"There is no spoon." - The Matrix
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 is not only about sharing music and video. There's for example all the work on distributed hashtables (Can, Chord, Pastry...) or distributed processing (SETI@Home and others).
But even with regular file-sharing you could do much more if you could search and publish files other than MP3s. Chemists or biologists could share melocule or gene descriptions, programmers could share design patterns, without depending on a central database that they do not control... But for this to work, you need a mechanism to provide (explicitly or not) metadata about the documents, because file names won't be enough.
If you're interested, check out the project I am working on: it is called U-P2P [sourceforge.net], and it allows the explicit description of documents, as well as the description of the specialized file-sharing community itself. We also published a paper at the FREENIX track of USENIX'03 this year, it should be available on their web site. If not, drop me a message and I'll send it to you.
"In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest."
P2P would be the perfect medium for cvsup and other similar services. Instead of a lagging server, people will update their source trees from whomever posses the most up-to-date copies.
Just a thought.
"Come on, let's go drink till we can't feel feelings anymore."
P2P can be used for more than just filesharing, too. check out skype - VoIP over P2P from the fellas who brought us all Kazaa... i am trying the beta now and talking clearly to friends across the globe....
Almost every business website now had some sort of paid content. So much content is free yet premium content and other features are on a subscription or pay per use model it's impossible to use any of them effectively without going broke.
Now that the internet is beginning to show the usual signs of capitalism it's becoming more of a less free zone than thre free zone everyone once enjoyed.
If I'm going to pay to use things on the internet then I want a low fee that covers everything so I can go where I wish otherwise I pay nobody.
I agree about the troll thing - I think a moderator or two is assuming that you aren't being honest. And I see what you are saying about the P2P thing, but I've got two problems with that - 1) Stopping innovation in order to "remove a scapegoat" seems a bit base-ackwards; 2) I really don't believe that would do the trick - there are other scapegoats out there... for example, did you know that there are actually huge factories out there that pump out illegal copies of CDs (in the millions!) everyday? That's what was being pointed to before the whole P2P thing...
I had a compyter engineering professor last year whos primary interest was P2P. Now he is working on the following: Professor Y. Charlie Hu is jointly leading a three-year, $1.8 million, multi-institutional program entitled Safari: A Scalable Architecture for Ad Hoc Networking and Services funded through the National Science Foundation's Special Projects in Networking Research. The project is to develop wireless networking technologies that will substantially increase the resilience of digital networks to physical disasters or attacks and extend its reach into economically disadvantaged parts of society and underdeveloped parts of the world. --from https://engineering.purdue.edu/ECE/News/Documents/ 1062648000.whtml
You think the RIAA and some legal shit is going to stop P2P?
One word: freenet. Once that thing [finally] gets off the ground, all of this bullshit is going to stop, pronto.
Then there's JXTA, which, if done properly should also be killer.
And last I checked, between KaZaA and SoulSeek, I could find all of the media I wanted [copyrighted or not].
Asking a question like that is like asking whether the War on Drugs will stop people from smoking pot!
is that p2p will never become as popular as instant messaging or blogging, but it's not going away completely. Something in between is likely, where it is used by those who really have a use for it kinda like a personal web page where people do it because they find it useful and better than alternatives but not every one needs it so not every one does it.
-Tim Louden
Here's an interesting question:
What if the music industry switched to some Apple style iMusic system, and 99% of the public used that system to buy their music. If only the hacker subculture used an archaic P2P systems to share music, would the RIAA be as rabid?
as a sophmore in college, i can tell you p2p is here to stay. i was all over napster back in its early days, untill its fall, imesh and morpheus soon after, followed by hotline(not p2p) irc(also not p2p) winmx and now waste. I watched a web server based file sharing system on my campus that only allow a few to share their media turn in to a DC (direct Connect) hub with a few terabytes of shared files, on a very small campus. Now this year, back to school, the school has new policies, network/firewall rules, that make something like IRC our only viable option, and option that, is, in all honesty, not user freindly when it comes to sharing files and information. Numerous students have asked me, "What happened to DC?, How am i supposed ot download now?" While, i;m not saying its a good thing many kids my age and younger grew up in highschool, being able to download any song movie or program they wanted, free of charge. Example, A new video game i want comes out tommorow, but $60 for a game? this time last year i could get it for free, which, while wrong, still seems pretty nice to me, and i'm sure just as nice to millions of others. P2P is here to stay.
mat
The possibilities are endless, really -- but if we accept that it will always be the case that some people are wielding power by preventing the masses from organizing, then there will always be a use for P2P.
So is the amount of music lost by "file-sharing"...
P2P, as a technology and as an infrastructure design, is not new. There have been p2p apps in use and around the 'net since before UUCP.
The press treatment of 'p2p technology as fad', though, is something which has been extremely useful to the RIAA propagandists. True p2p users, however, know that there will *ALWAYS* be p2p apps out there, for as long as it is legal to write your own network protocol implementation, anyway.
As long as people continue to believe that there is 'always something new around the corner that might be cooler', then there is fluidity, and Big Media can start to introduce the 'consolidated applications' (AOL 9.0, anyone?) which
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I don't understand why anyone would think the RIAA stupdity has anything real to say about the importance or viablity of P2P. P2P means "peer-to-peer", it does not mean "sneaky ways to move illegal and quasi-legal (rightly or wrongly) content". In particular edge level computing is absolutely essential as is grid computing. It is amazing to me that after all of these years since I build my first system that was P2P 15 years+ ago, that client-server still predominates. It is really bizarre to have orders of magnitude more power in front of the user being used basically as a still pretty dumb terminal. This is clearly a waste and shows a singular lack of imagination and/or the presence of factors that keep more efficient topologies from being fielded.
For instance, there is something new out there called the INTRA-web. Rather than connect to the OUTSIDE world in an attempt to get information, you simply search your own hard drive.
Although you may have meant your comments sarcastically, what you write does have both merit and truth.
The phenomena of small physically-close groups of people sharing resources over a private LAN has grown rapidly, particularly thanks to 802.11. Apartment-wide LANs, private wireless subnets in dorms, even connections between small groups of neighbors in separate actual buildings...
Put another way, between me and my 10 closest friends, we have almost every major CD, DVD, and game released in recent history. Providing shared access between us means we would never need to actually go searching on the net for such material (of course, I don't happen to live on even the same continent as all my friends, but the point remains the same).
I don't see this as going away, and in fact, thanks to the RIAA, I expect such low-profile networks will become far more common. And good luck to the RIAA in cracking down on something they can't even see without happening to live within a few hundred feet of an active node (and have the trust of the owner of that node to let them look around).
A while back I talked to a guy who runs a business computer network and he was griping that you can't hardly buy computers anymore with less than 40GB of hard drive space. Most of that space is wasted for office workers.
He was looking into using P2P to replace file servers. If you let multiple copies of documents live on many computers and you have redundancy. Add a P2P system to that and you make it easy to find those documents.
Obviously you have to look at versioning and permissions, but the idea is interesting.
-- I browse at +5 with stripped sigs
Personally I stopped with the whole p2p thing after Audio Galaxy died. I wasn't into it big even then. I liked getting a lot of tunes that were hard to find (ie: weren't played on the radio, tv, promoted or even sold in most stores.) I can't stand any p2p now because in all its forms it's a pain in the ass to use. Hence why I stopped after AG. AG was flawless. Great interface, and it took care of getting the song to you - never failed. Tiny, tiny client too.
;) And anything I listen to in the future will be an indirect result of p2p because now I'm privvy to many artists and lables I never knew existed prior to p2p. Anyhow, it seems to me like a lot of people just download for the sake of downloading. I have a lot of friends who collect thousands of mp3s, and hundreds of movies and never listen to or watch them! They don't even know what they have on their hard drive.
When I used p2p, I had a reasonable purpose. I wanted to explore new music, and I found p2p great for that. And I'll have you know that most of my collection of CDs were legitimately purchased CDs and were the result of using p2p. (The others are copies from CDs borrowed from friends which is legal in Canada. That's a small fraction though.
It's like getting their money's worth on what they spend for a high speed connection and massive hard drive. They're not necessarily interested in what they're downloading, so long as there's a constant stream of data over the line and something changing the colour of the pie chart.
To me, this sort of behaviour seems to indicate a fad, and I think it'll pass; That is downloading for the sake of downloading which is what I think a lot of people are doing (no actual loss on sales there, hello RIAA and MPAA.) However, p2p will not go away, it'll simply maintain a (useful) niche, become used for more legitimate purposes, and people will treat it as a utility - which is what it is.
I'm now beginning to become annoyed by p2p since my roommates are hogging all the bandwidth on our internet connection, and the filtering software on the router doesn't seem to work.
I'll be happy when the music and movie fad is over and p2p is put to some real good use. How about free and open source software distribution. I'm sure it's being done and p2p seems like the perfect method of distribution - sharing resources with those who are sharing code.
-kidlinux.
"I for one welcome our new P2P overlords!"
;^)
;)
;)
:)
Anyway, let's just state the obvious: (IMHO
P2P will never die. It is NOT a passing fad.
(I don't use it, but that's another story
P2P is forcing (or going to force) some companies to change the way they do business. There is no way around it. Adapt or die.
(And yes, some rights/things/bands/products will be lost along the way - I can see why some companies are keen on palladium and DRM and god knows what else)
I cannot even begin to predict how this will affect the game/software/movie/music industry...
A time of great change is upon us...
(In internet-terms: This will all have been sorted out by the end of next week
Just my 0.02 cents
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.
has got to be bit torrent.
Yes, gone will be the days of connecting to other computers and transferring data. Soon, very soon...
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
I'll bite as well. Now I agree that piracy "may" be contributing to some loss of sales, I also propose that it is also generating sales as well. The truely sad part of the matter is that they are even telling their employees that the problems they are facing are all because of piracy. Now, I don't buy that BS at all. There are just as many studies out there that support the case that P2P and music downloading are generating CD sales as there are case studies that say the opposite.
The real issue here is the fact that thier business model was forced to change due to technological developments, and they don't want to change at all. They feel that they should continue to mass produce the same style songs as they have been for the last 10-12 years and still have people eat up everything they lay on the plate. Well, P2P and Napsture has changed that. No more can they just place 1 or 2 decent songs on an album and expect everyone to go out and purchase that album for $20 just for those 2 songs. The music industry needs to actually redesign the way they produce and sell their music now. They can no longer expect people to buy the $20 album for those 2 songs with another 7-8 of pure filler. P2P has caused this problem, and that, I will concede.
No more will customers continually overpay for the product, as they know that CD's are easily created (physically created), and they also know how easy it is to mix songs that they (the customers) like to listen to. They want to be able to purchase a "custom" CD with the tracks that they select, not what they are told they "must" buy. People will no longer stand for purchasing something at full price for only wanting to listen to 16% of the product.
Now that is only the start of the problem that the music industry is facing. The other problem is the fact that they have been signing fewer and fewer new bands and creating less and less new music. There was a great study posted here before (sorry, too lazy to look it up), which delt with compairing the number of new bands signed (and their respective new songs produced) with the overall sales generated that year for the music industry. The study showed that there was a very high correlation between the number of new bands to the number of sales. Over the past 3 years, there has been approximately 30-40% decline in the number of new bands being signed. According to the numbers in that study, at least 20% of the "lost" sales over the last 3 years should be attributed to the fact that there are 30-40% less new bands being singed and thus less "new" styles of music out there that people might sample.
You can also chalk up a minumum of 10% more of the "lost" sales to the major economic troubles being faced in this country as well. You yourself should be able to realise this, especially with your wife lossing her job. Well, she isn't the only one out of work, or working in a job that pays far less then the prievious one. What is the first thing that you stop purchasing when you suddenly loose a major part of your income? Well you cut out non-essential purchases, i.e. anything that is not related to shelter, food, and health. Well, guess what doesn't fall under any of those 3 categories, $20 music CDs. With so many fresh-out-of-college students unable to find a job in the industry they just spent upwards of $100,000 over the last 4-5 years, and can only get work in the same summer job industries they could be imployed BEFORE they got that degree, you seriously think they will have the extra cash to purchase music CD's for $15-20 a pop?
The RIAA needs to seriously look at the above problem. They want to blame P2P and piracy for everything. Well, it isn't the real cause. The problem is and always has been their business model. P2P in a sense could be blamed, but only because it showed people that they should have to be forced purchase 100% of a product for only wanting to use 8% of that product.
I won't even get into the issue of P2P actually helping sales by introducing people to music that they never
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Guster? eGag.
The meme police, They live inside of my head
A 'priviledged' user on the internet is someone with admin access to a host that is always connected, has regular domain name, a static IP address, a fast connection, and runs its own services. The completely priviledged user would be able to run any sort of network server/client that they wished. A completely underpriviledged user would be someone who occasionally uses a laptop/PDA that they don't admin that connects behind a NAT and depends on other servers/domains for e-mail, web, etc. P2P is about technologies for allowing the underpriviledged user to participate in the same type of networking applications, especially content generating ones, that the priviledged user does. There are a set of technologies like http tunneling, virtual DNS, network discovery, etc. that allow simply allow this to happen.
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.
This spanish web used P2P to distribute amateur videos of the "Campus Party" computer event.
Videos:
Conference Hispalinux.
Conference Windows vs Linux.
Video Frikis en el Chill out.
Video Computer Mods.
P2P: From People to People.
DISCLAIMER: I'm not trying to be flamebait here, but most of the comments I've read on this article are very US-centric. I'm just trying to state the facts, not be insulting.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
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
I remember there being ftp channels in IRC and newsgroups hosting copyright materials back when I was 8. That would have been in 1988. I think it's safe to say that if p2p has been around for 15 years it will continue on. Perhaps the face will change, but the soul will stay the same. Copyrighted or not, you simply can not stop people from sharing data.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
Well, sort of -- you can do multiple packages where BT downloads a whole folder-worth of files. Yes, you have to do a link to the folder, but so what?
If you are uploading multiple Kazaa files, they too will have to split your upload bandwidth. It has nothing to do with having one, two, or even three instances of the program up; two Kazaa upload threads is the same as two BT instances open. As long as cable companies cap the upload bandwidth, that's gonna be a problem.
It's also why BT is so beautiful -- your download isn't just courtesy of one person uploading, but multiple people, so you're good to go.
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.
Damn it, I'd still *use* Gopher if people hadn't taken down all of their Gopher servers and replaced them with this "World Wide Web" crap. :P
:P
Information via plain ol' text. I like it. No Flash ads in Gopher.
Title: Has P2P Become a Passing Fad?
Yes, just like music, movies, and pr0n...
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
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!
P2p, which is a silly term to use really, is just about peer to peer. It's about hosts communicating directly with each other.
If I send you a ping... that's a p2p operation.
If I send you an email, it's not.. there are servers involved.
If I ftp a file to your computer, that' s a p2p operation.
Old-style unix "talk" command is p2p.
New-style instant messengers aren't (sort of)
What is it really about, except the ability of computers to communicate directly to each other. Now.. that's what the internet is.
The future of the network is partially p2p... I don't mean file sharing (because we always had that).. but in machines sem-intelligently communicating directly with each other.. and helping each other out, rather than having everything localized at big servers. Why not? it's not revolutionary, it's not sneaky... it just makes sense. We have more bandwidth, therefore methods of doing things that were not practical in the past are now practical.
It's a shame that people can't look past the somewhat shady uses of some new technology and see the benefits.
Look at bittorrent... it is a great example. It's not 100% distributed, but it uses the p2p concept to let a bunch of machines help each other out towards a common goal.. and it works really well.
Look at skype.. it's neat... the kazaa model applied to voip (sort of). Great idea....
Look at kazaa.... let's forget for a few minutes that it's mostly porn and copyrighted music, and think in terms of the number of items available in a large, searchabale index, for anyone to get... all without the need for any central, dedicated server.. now that's pretty cool.
Now picture these things working together... ideas like "swarm computing" "hive computing" "chaotic routing" and whatnot are really all about ways for things to work semi-autonomously...
it's great.
p2p will always be in the best interest of all us. Sure, Apple has a product for distributing music legall. But mp3's arn't the only usage of p2p. Yes, people use it for porn too, but p2p also allows all of us to share ANYTHING. p2p is somewhat like the web, a way for us all to speak up, to share things, to "publish" our ideas. We live in a world where it is hard to speak out. Until the web one had to run for public office or write a letter to the editor of your local paper.
p2p and the web changed all that. While legal mechanism like iTunes will continue to grow and be used, in all fairness Apple is designing a service that will make them money, not one that will let me be heard, or share my work with others. p2p is the easiest way, although not necessarily the best way, to acheive that.
Will Stokes Album Shaper http://albumshaper.sf.net
I'm not clear on the role played by the word "legal" in the above sentence... all p2p technologies are used to distribute data. Bittorrent is no more and no less legal than kazaa, morpheus, gnutella, etc. And judging by the content I've seen being distributed, Bittorrent content is not particularly any more or less legal either. I acknowledge that Bram Cohen looks like a nice guy, but we shouldn't let his attractiveness skew our judgements.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
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
I mean I get more bandwidth over sneaker net than I do across the internet. And I don't have to worry about my government or the **AA intercepting my personal private data.
My family doesn't care if they ever get broadband, and now I'm finally starting to agree with them. Our society just ain't smart enough to know what to do with this technology, so we police it, tax it and commercialize it. Its almost forced monopolization of an extremely valuable service. Bra vo. Watch us turn the internet into the next cable TV network or telephone system. Watch us repeat our historical examples over and over and over again. Just watch us.
Oh well. I guess they'll have to find a different business model.
Big Brother Bush is doubleplus ungood.
Hey guys!
This is just an idea which I'm not more able to think through tonight (it's very later here), but what about a UDP approach to a file sharing system. Everybody sending something to you could definitely be anonymous (UDP does not require a valid source IP). The tricky thing would be how to actually _find_ stuff, because that would need the IP of the potential source to be known. Hmmm...
Any bright ideas?
Isn't the web p2p by definition? If I run httpd on my computer it certainly is, no?
There are some p2p networks that allow access to gigantic amounts of media for easy download; this "service" is very attractive and has become a synonymous for p2p, any technology that provides this will be successful.
Most implementations of this "universal online media database" today are certainly illegal and cumbersome, increasing attacks against users and trash data proliferation could cause users to shift to legal non p2p emusic type of services.
If these users cease to use p2p networks their traffic could drop enough to kill the fad.
Sadly legal services are not yet as good as the troubled illegal p2p ones (for one thing they carry music only).
Walking down the street today I heard an 'older' guy in a suit say "My kids want broadband to download music and movies", he didn't talk about networks or software clients but i'm guessing this kids will be using kazaa.
And the next headlines on Slashdot being about the latest crack-down on the ever-persistent internet pirates.
I'm not a fan of copyright law or really any of this legislation or the prosecution of the individuals involved. But we need an agreement, not an arms race. The harder we make it to track the harder 'they' will work to prosecute/legislate/etc.
And its understandable. P2P and file sharing in general is too important to let it get eclipsed in this battle and that's why we *need* DRM. At least that way protected files popping up on a sharing networks isn't reason enough to shut it down and it *shouldn't* be.
Quack, quack.
As it slowly moves towards the concept of distributed computing, of sharing both raw data and community processing power, it will become even more prevelant then today..
But it will also be moved back into the darkness of the infrastructure of the 'net.
Remember p2p is a concept.. not an application..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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?
p2p is a nifty solution, but there are intrinsic problems (with technological solutions).
1. There's no way to verify whether the copyright owner approves of it being distributed through these networks.
2. p2p lets you search for well-known things, but not obscure things (or names you don't know). P2p doesn't give you ideas about what to search for. (BTW, Audiogalaxy was particularly good at doing that when it was around).
3. p2p doesn't have a good way to store people's recommendations or correlative tastes (if you like X, you'll like Y) or related items.
4. p2p doesn't do a good job in letting the user know what versions is the definitive version (This may be a user issue).
An interesting solution by the way is iRATE radio (read my interview with the lead developer ). He chose a centralized model for legal reasons and versioning reasons.
5. At the moment, p2p clients don't have a way of tipping artists or linking to their website within the client (this will undoubtedly change over time). WWW is still the best way to learn more information about an artist.
Robert Nagle
www.sharethemusicday.com
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
I think people will be using encrypted P2P 'trust' networks with people they know and trust. Unfortunately, this will have the effect of further segmenting the internet. However, the '3 degrees of seperation' effect could ameliorate that to a certain extent.
These 'meta-networks' are the wave of the future - unless they become outlawed, at which point the internet as we know it is dead, given that this would also kill VPNs - the staple of many businesses.
A P2P wireless network of networks based on the MIT Roofnet or similar technology would be the next logical step. That could be banned, as well.
On the face of it the situation looks more and more like Soviet Russia - without the Beowulf cluster of Natalie Portman, being banned, of course!
"When networks are outlawed, only outlaws will have networks"
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
P2p will survive and grow if, and only if, the content available via p2p is attractive.
The question posed is a bit like asking, 500 years ago, if the printing press will survive. Well...it depends on what's printed.
If p2p is the only way to get something people want, then it will surviv e. If p2p offers nothing people want, it will fade.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Who, me?
sleep (60);
press (submit);
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
The only thing new about p2p is the acronym and the hysteria. How would you describe a bunch of SMTP servers all talking to each other? What's new is the idea that personal computers can be more than clients. Computers that were formerly only described as clients are taking on some of the responsibilities of servers. And yes, the trend will continue.
The change we are witnessing is not the emergence of p2p, it is the disappearance of the client.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
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.
Where else would I get all my free porn from??!!
...there are sockets to program to and some kind of TCP/IP protocol, you will see P2P programs. What theroy is that, as long as something can happen, it will happen...or something like that....
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Yes much like the Internet, P2P is a passing fad.
The cost of distribution is zero. The marginal cost per unit is zero.
The cost of redistribution is zero. The marginal cost per unit is zero for everyone.
If you'd taken marketing 101, they'd ask you what value the company provides to the consumer. Since the consumer can do exactly the same as the company, the value of the company is $0 (until we introduce laws like copyright).
Imagine you lived in the Star Trek universe and tried selling replicated goods for a profit. The crew would go "Huh? I can make that in my own replicator."
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
about MS Network Neighborhood, File and Printer sharing and how will the RIAA get Billy to remove that feature from Windoze?
Oh well, what the hell...
p2p systems were a tool of the quasi-elite teenager back in the day (a year or two ago, if not longer!), alot has happened since those years long past... Today p2p is a typical tool in every house equipped with a pc. Everybody has morpheus or kazaa, bearshare, etc.
Today p2p filesharing is the equivelent to having a pair of scissors in the house, or a fork, or a hammer. It's not something worth thinking about anymore, it's taken for granted. I don't see p2p filesharing going anywhere.
Unrestricted P2P maybe a passing fad. Just like the BB of the 80's. Its going to change its shape, speed, ease of use, security, and other characteristics. In 10 years P2P will become even more translucent in our everyday use. Remember its good for all files, not just movies, music, and p0rn. I'm not sure what else I would use it for, but I'm positive its place in computing will not disappear completely.
As for sharing music, thats probably doomed. However, we can regroup. Maybe by starting local P2P networks with your friends, and your friends friends, and so on... Oh wait, how'd we get to 43 million users. We certainly are friendly. Of course, we could just encrypt our files and only provide the key to people we know and love.
Besides, if you and I are sharing files, verbally declair our share as private, Put up a keep out sign, but accidentally leave it exposed to the world for all to see, wouldn't the RIAA be hacking our computers. Oh, wait, we would have to incorporate first to have that kind of hypocrisy.
AOL is still around, so P2P should be able to survive.
Looks like it is time to replace your Personality Module. You are a bit to clingy, guess I better replace your fuser to
P2P is not the new revolution, nor will it completely fade away. It'll just stop getting hyped and take its place alongside all the other revolutions that didn't cause a massive upheaval on the Internet but are still useful in some niches, like push technology or VNC or a dozen other techniques.
Jugding by the stats I keep on kazaa, I don't see this phenomenon fading anytime soon.
EXACTLY! Awesome point that I think a LOT of people, espiecally mainstream media, do not understand. I've said similar things in previous posts. Basically, the RIAA will get rid of illegal music the day after the ATF and Coast Guard get rid of illegal drugs. So... uh... never.
We won't know the extent of the backlash from the lawsuits for a while yet. What happens when they sue the little sister of a vengeful gangster? Maybe they sort through the suspects and only sue those without a criminal record?
I'd happilly subscribe to a service that charged around 1 or $1 per album, and offered a wide catalogue of music at as-fast-as-you-can-get-it download speeds. Most folk would find that preferable to piracy, and in many ways it would be more convienient than the p2p queues. At the moment, p2p is easier than the alternatives, going to a store or ordering a hard-copy online.
Does $1/album seem like a fair return on the artist/company's time to you? Seems a bit low to me.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
Not if they sold 20 times more copies than they currently are selling, which they certainally would at those prices.
As more people get afraid of these lawsuits, they will simply trade with trusted friends instead of sharing with the whole world. However the money bleed on the RIAA and record companies will not stop at this point. In the past person to person music trading was limited to how much you could stuff on a few cassette tapes. But today, you can sneakily FTP your whole library of music to a friend, or burn thousands of songs to a few CD's or a DVD-R or two and trade large chunks of the RIAA's music at a time. So even if they DO manage to destroy or limit the use of P2P, people will just do real life P2P, handing CD's to each other or giving their friend a log in to an easy to set up FTP server to trade with them. The RIAA is finished no matter how successful their campaign is.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
"The cost of distribution is zero"
I see you've met the bandwidth fairy.
When a company produces such a massive amount of something, the cost of production goes way down. It may cost you 50 cents to burn and package a CD but a major corporation isn't paying more than a penny or two if that per CD. Production costs for distribution in any format are negligable.
The other advantage of packaging is that it's a big giant ad. When people are walking through the store amist thousands of other products, a well designed box will make them stop and look.
On-line, unless it's on the front page or you're specifically looking for it, it doesn't matter how pretty the box is, you won't see it. The spontanious purchase goes out the window. Most people also don't care to leave their 56K modems churning all week downloading some massive game. Broadband hasn't fully replaced the dial up yet and it's going to be a very long time before it does.
And people are still not all that comfortable buying things on-line. They like to get out and be around people and go to a real physical location and spend their real physical money on a real physical product.
On-line sales can be used in conjunction with store based sales and most companies already do that. I bet that if you e-mailed any company and asked how on-line sales compare to physical store sales, the digital sales would barely register.
I really don't care if Amazon has a game or movie or CD a few cents cheaper. I'd rather go out shopping. Hardware and stuff that nobody else carries are the only things I'll look on-line for.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Second generation P2P, which uses consistent distributed hashing for organizing the network topology and lookup, have the potential to be "the future". Read Pastry and Scribe work at Rice, Content Addressible Networks at UC Berkeley, PeerCQ at Georgia Tech, and others.
They provide amazingly scalable (i.e. - theoretically internet wide) network topologies for things like multicasting, distributed file systems, and network monitoring.
Great stuff, and generations ahead of anything Kazaa/Napster/Gnutella did.
No, because something better came. I think p2p will be around for a long time to come, until something better comes to pirate software/media or unload servers of legal (huh??) software. :-)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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.
What is .net? Didn't Gatestron allude to the fact that some huge percentage of processor cycles are wasted each day (and not just playing QwakerealTournament 2005 or surfing for porno?) and we should take advantage of this? Maybe it was someone from Sun, but the point stands. The major names in SW and HW development WANT P2P, but not on the users terms. No, P2P needs more rules and protection, lest the lowly user attempts to suborn the network for his own heinous wants.
On another topic, if no one can send powerful hardware to "terroristic" nations, could they not just use a SETI styled distributed thingamabob to guide the missles, or design new and improved WMD (of which we still have not seen hide nor hair)?
Those people who used the internet before it became well known to the general public know that the whole f-ing thing was p2p already. This notion of some people being content providers exclusively and others being content consumers exclusively is something that only happened after it gained the notice of the commercial sector. Consider old fashioned usenet, for example. It was a P2P system long before p2p was a buzzword. The only thing that modern p2p does in addition to what the raw IP protocol already provides is that it makes a management system that helps to *find* the other hosts out there to connect to, instead of asking people to always have to go to a well-known site. Once a connection is established between client and server, all the traffic is completely peer-to-peer. Any machine can be a server, any can be a client.
What's happening is NOT that P2P is going away. What's happening is that it's becoming dumb to keep using that buzzword for what is essentially the way the internet was designed to work in the first place.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
If only they knew some.
What the rise and rise of P2P ("Pirate to Pirate" as we call them) networks shows is that to many people the risk costs of P2P are less than the cost of "legitimate" media contents.
The recent music CD price reduction is a grudging and very late admission of this salient fact.
Getting legal client/server systems out to the consumers at an even lower risk cost will almost completely eliminate illicit uses of P2P technologies. Because for most people, it just won't be worth it.
"The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool." -- William Shakespeare, (1564-1616) Poe
The characteristic of P2P is that it allows communication across the network without specific single points of control.
The first application that exploited this on an Internet-wide scale was email.
Other applications built to this principle have the potential to be as world-changing as email was.
P2P is NOT just file copying.
Is/was Usenet a "passing fad"?
Really, what's a "fad" in this context, and how does it "pass"?
If by "fad" is meant "something that makes headlines" then of course it will pass, but does that make it less used, or fit for its purpose, or what? I remember when colour TV was a "fad" - at least, it was a common topic of conversation and generated lots of exitement (will snooker become the new baseball?). But how often do you hear about it now? Is that because nobody watches colour TV any more?
If something comes along to REPLACE it then that's a different matter. P2P will probably "pass" in that case - but I think that's unlikely.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
One thing to keep in mind is that P2P programming actually encompasses a variety of functions that don't neccessarily include illegal file sharing.
P2P applications are also the siblings of cycle sharing, ad hoc networking and redundant data storage for backup and emergancy situations. P2P networks are used by the military to create ad hoc networks that are disaster proof and popular applications like SETI use cycle sharing to boost their available processing power.
P2P will eventually even find its way (conceptually anyway) into the way devices are designed with more distributed aspects to current systems that make failure of any part of the system non critical.
However, as this comment probably is referring to the file sharing aspects of P2P - I would say that it will be a constant tug of war between the regulatory agencies and everyone else who resents the sometimes (not always) userous fees and monopolistic pricing practices used by certain entities (and no I'm not just referring to Microsoft and the RIAA). It's like the Internet's own 'Boston Tea Party'.
There are an endless amount of ways that people can get around legislation to pursue file sharing if they want and even if the govt repeals all of our civil liberties in the effort to restrict file sharing people will still do it, the legal environment just can't keep pace with technology.
Doh
Gotta meeting
Later
the clients have to become the servers AND the clients have to encrypt their data streams. AND the clients have to be connected to the internet by fat fast pipes. this gives the edge of the network control over what content is shared and how and to whom it is sent. the RIAA suits work mostly because they can find an easy ISP host target with easy to decipher file names and a list of subscribers. subtract these advantages and their goal becomes much less do-able. ( i still hope that a new internet is born from the wireless networking trend... say one where a wireless router in a home or a car or a backpack links to and interacts with other wireless routers in other homes and cars backpacks on a completely local basis. ) what will we call this? ...friendnet...peoplenet?
There are millions of uses for P2P beyond sharing inferior mp3 files. Science, medicine, education... ...and government.
What we need to eliminate are industry-paid representatives to the government (senators, legislature) and use P2P to allow the public to represent itself.
The other fad which needs to eliminated are music publishers.
The big cable companies are certainly hoping that it's a passing fad. The last figures that I saw indicated that on the order of one-third of the downstream bandwidth used on the cable modem networks was generated by a quite small percentage of the users doing P2P downloads. The fraction of upstream bandwidth being consumed by those same users with P2P was much higher. And of course, since much of the usage involved transfers to/from machines not on the local network, they consume a lot of expensive bandwidth into the backbone networks.
Cable modem service would be much more profitable if the companies could shed the right 2% of their users. We used to love it when those users would threaten us with "I'll take my business somewhere else." Couldn't say it, but the company would have loved to help them move to DSL...
i saw guster in kansas city in i think it was july 2002 with john mayer.. awesome
What is slashdot?
A long-haul network can never have latency as low as that of PCI or AGP because signals just move too slowly through copper or fiber. In fact, speed-of-light limitations are part of why the Pentium 4 has such a deep pipeline, to get the signals moved across the core reliably.
Can the popular NUMA computing models deal with 50ms communication latencies?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I haven't seen a LANTastic installation in years.
Thanks, but as an AC?
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
I use to be into P2P, now i am into DC++ or Waste Networks. I never like KaZaa in the First place, it always seems there were 12 Year Olds Ripping CD's to MP3's with crapy Software ( Never Done, Songs Skip, Crapy Bit Rate )... So i left the P2P Networks, and hope it deads. Long Live DC!
Yeah, I also saw Guster with John Mayer and John Butler Trio when they were in Portland in 2002 (can't remember now). Guster and JBT were awesome and were the real reasons why I went to the concert. I always love how the crowd goes nuts when they play "Airport Song" and "Happier". Now I'm addicted to "Parachute".
heh... after looking at the Guster section of archive.org/audio, it looks like it was August 2nd 2002 for their Kansas City, MO stop. I don't know about Kansas City, Kansas though ;)
Modern P2P applications tend to do two things beyond the original WWW model:
You mention that popular file-sharing apps bundle the server and client into one download and claim that this has dubious value. I claim that this has value: it encourages people to actually use the server as opposed to just leeching with the client.
You also forget to mention that popular file-sharing apps automatically handle indexing content available on peers, as opposed to the Web, where Google can take up to a month to find your site, or longer if nobody else links to your site in a well-known web page.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The future of peer to peer networks is the distribution of content produced by individuals or small groups of people for the public domain. With the increasing power of computers the ability for individuals to produce content cheaply and of high quality increases. The real threat to the current pigopolist model is not pirating of their content but the flooding of the internet with public domain content produced by people for other people to share. You only have so many hours in the day to make use of content so the greater the amount available the greater the competition, and when it comes to overpriced pigopolist content versus free public domain content you can see why the RIAA and its ilk hate peer to peer networks.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen