View source for P2P Filesharing

The following entry has some information about the 'three generations of technology' used in peer to peer filesharing.

'''Typology of programs:'''

" Open-source peer-to-peer software development takes many forms, ranging from obscure hobbyist projects with only a few users to software programs that have been downloaded tens of millions of times. Many of the most influential peer-to-peer ideas, such as the hydra-headed decentralization of Gnutella or the speedy "swarming" downloads of BitTorrent, have come from this community. At one end of the spectrum are projects like Shareaza, which are wholly decentralized, without a controlling entity at all that bears legal or financial responsibility. On the other are companies like LimeWire and MetaMachine, both of which have open-source development products, but have revenue-generating businesses based on selling software and associated products. Somewhere in the middle are younger companies such as Aelitis, the French company recently formed by developers of the Azureus BitTorrent client, the most popular piece of software tracked by Sourceforge, a well-trafficked open-source software development hub. According to that site, Azureus has been downloaded more than 78 million times, and more than 2.4 million times in the last week alone."
(http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/showthread.php?t=21779 )

Legal commercial filesharing systems are:  Peer Impact, Weed and Mercora


'''Filesharing without central servers''':

"From the second generation on, you had distributed servers. You could run your own server and tie them into others. Searches took longer, were less accurate and there was no guarantee you would be searching a single other machine, much less the entire network. It was however, unstoppable. For every node you took the time and money to blast out of existence, there were several thousand others springing up. Clearly, the old tactics would not work. To make matters worse, these new networks were aware of the tactics being used against them, and actively tried to nullify them.  As the network programmers were adding features, they were also adding security, both for them, and for their users. Things started out simple, like support for file types other than MP3, and quickly became more sophisticated. Military grade encryption? No problem. Licence restrictions that beat the pigopolists with the very sticks they created? Sure, pick any of five. Random user names, obfuscated IP addresses, changing ports and just about everything else you could think of has been done by now. 

The real stake in the heart of the RIAA and friends came with the complete removal of servers, in a true peer to peer sense. Instead of having many little servers, you had every node doing dual purpose client and server jobs. Searches were completely decentralised, and the RIAA was finished, period. The recent string of stinging court losses for the Greediest Monopoly on Earth in the US courts assured any chance the RIAA had was gone. Its worst nightmare was confirmed, as everyone else just knew, the services were completely legal. The Grokster decision affirmed the right of the companies to provide the services they always have, and to do so with impunity. People using it may be guilty of crimes, but the services themselves are not illegal. In the old days, there was one provider, and one repository, one throat to strangle. It was manageable technically if it came down to a technical solution. Instead of allowing that technical solution to blossom, they went the legal route, and lost. In the intervening years, the tech went around them, and they sat still, and possibly regressed. 

The problem with forced evolution is that it tends to work. The RIAA made the networks evolve technically, from a relatively incocous MP3 network to the file sharing network from hell. There is nothing you can't get anymore, and there is no one to stop it. If they came up with a tool, unlikely as that may be, there is no place to implement it.�?
(http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=18206 )

'''The third generation of peer-to-peer networking technology'''

"Each successive generation has decentralized more functions, making the networks harder to shut down and helping to expand the power of searches. The first first generation of file-swapping services, led by Napster, were built around big centralized indexes that would keep track of what was available everywhere on the network. These would serve as matchmakers, linking a person searching for a file with the computer where it was stored. That was efficient, allowing access to a huge range of material--but it also proved to be illegal. Courts said that Napster was responsible for a network where a vast amount of copyright infringement was happening and ultimately shut the company down. The second generation of decentralized services, led by Gnutella and the FastTrack technology underlying Kazaa, soon emerged to take its place. Neither of these had central servers. They relied instead on passing search requests from computer to computer until a file was found, and then passed that information back to the original searcher. That technology proved initially unwieldy, as millions of search requests passed through every computer on the network, creating traffic jams at low-bandwidth bottleneck points. That improved over time as programmers figured out ways to hand off these search requests more efficiently, but usually resulted in searches that included only part of a network--say 100,000 people instead of 2 million. A U.S Appeals Court recently ruled that this kind of decentralized network was legal, unlike Napster, in part because the software distributors did not have direct control over what was happening on the networks. "The (record labels and movie studios) urge a re-examination of the law in the light of what they believe to be proper public policy," the court wrote in that decision. "Doubtless, taking that step would satisfy the copyright owners' immediate economic aims. However, it would also alter general copyright law in profound ways with unknown ultimate consequences outside the present context." The third generation of networks, represented by eDonkey and now Morpheus, as well as a host of smaller independent developers, makes the tools even more decentralized than before. Distributed hash tables are essentially a way of taking a snapshot of where every file on the network is at a given moment and scattering bits of that information around the entire network. To find a given file, a search request goes first to any computer on the network. That computer will point to a different computer that has a little more information on how to find the file. The third computer might have information on the file itself--or it might take a few more hops to find the computer with the right information. The process is analogous to asking a succession of increasingly informed tour guides for directions, rather than accosting random people on the street. The information about the network in each place is constantly being updated as new files or computers are added."
(http://news.com.com/Super-powered+peer+to+peer/2100-1032_3-5397784.html?)

Some online music resources:

An article explaining how to find legal online music, at : http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/10/a...sic/10INTE.html ; Grouper is a software tool that lets you share music amongst friends only, to ensure the fair use principle, at http://www.grouper.com/ ; user-enriched evaluations of filesharing programs at http://www.slyck.com/programs.php

The OECD in a recent report said it was difficult to establish a link between P2P filesharing and the music industry's shrinking revenues, at http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,67820,00.html?; the report is at http://www.oecd.org/document/46/0,2340,en_2649_201185_34994926_1_1_1_1,00.html 

An overview of how the music industry is reacting to the challenges to its music distribution models, at http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2005/tc20050628_9810_tc024.htm 

William Fisher, author of “Promises to Keep�? has undertaken comprehensive calculations of what it would take to compensate the loss of revenue through filesharing. It would take $6 per month per user. See http://www.tfisher.org/PTK.htm for access to the book; and see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/02/01/free_legal_downloads/ for a summary by The Register.

'''Book: Promises to Keep. Technology, Law, and the Future of Entertainment. William W. Fisher III. Stanford University Press, 2004'''

'''P2P Weblog''' monitors filesharing developments, including its political and economic aspects, at http://www.p2p-weblog.com/ 

P2P based research companies who monitor the filesharing world for market research, at http://www.bigchampagne.com/

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