The Hindu : National : P2P is here to stay

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Aug 31, 2005

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National

P2P is here to stay

Anand Parthasarathy

Study shows file swapping doesn't go away, it only shifts from one site to another

BANGALORE: Internet file swapping between surfers — known as peer to peer (P2P) file sharing — accounts for between a half and three-quarters of all traffic on the world wide web and the heat created by music and film companies hasn't dampened the enthusiasm of sharers. It only shifts the traffic from a site under the spotlight, to a less visible one.

This is the finding of the U.K.-based Net traffic management player CacheLogic, which has just carried out what is possibly the first definitive study of the P2P phenomenon. In 2004 the favoured technology for file swapping came from BitTorrent: For a time, it accounted for half of all file sharing traffic on the Net. Then the Hollywood film studios began targeting the site, claiming it was being used to illegally download the latest movies even before they reached the screen.

Flavour of the month

Now, CacheLogic finds, the P2P `flavour of the month' seems to be the New York-based eDonkey. The service overtook another popular file sharing site, Kazaa some time back and is now the most popular swapping site in Korea — the nation with the world's highest Internet broadband usage.

The survey also found that some sites like Gnutella go off the radar for some time and then come back into usage. Another site, Grokster, lost a case in the U.S. courts when it pleaded it was not responsible if its users exchanged copyright material. The mother of all Net downloading services, Napster, had to quit the business when it was similarly arraigned.

Since then, P2P sites have refined their model and usage no longer leaves an `audit trail' at a central clearing-house.

In India, Kazaa is perhaps the most-used file sharing service , mostly for music — and the Nandita Das- starring Hindi film Supari became the world's first full length feature film to be available as a legitimate download from Kazaa for a $2.99 fee in 2003.

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