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Sci Tech
The power, promise and perils of `P2P'
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Peer-to-Peer computing has been touted as the most promising trend of the Internet age. Then why is industry throttling its first practical application: music sharing? Anand Parthasarathy assesses the key developments in this arena - an d its long-term implications.
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THE MOMENT one moots the idea of computers across the world sharing their files and data, people say: "You mean, like Napster?"
The path breaking Web resource created by American college dropout Shawn Fanning had a glorious run of about 14 months, during which a steady clientele of 13— 14 million young users used the service to swap files in the MP3 format with fellow music lovers. It all ended in the summer of 2001, when Napster was forced to shut down and eventually driven to bankruptcy after the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) won a protracted court case which judged that Napster's clearing house services amounted to encouragement of music piracy.
But here's the irony: According to a San Francisco based research agency, Odyssey, while around 39 million traded music online during Napster's heydays, the figure since then has only crept up — to around 41 million. "Napster is dead. Long live Son of Napster"? It looks like that.
Last week a federal court in Los Angeles in what was hailed as "a stunning victory for file swapping services" determined that the Napster-like resources provided by two others, Stream Cast (creators of the Morpheus software) and Grokster, were not liable for any copyright infringements that might take place using their software.
The judge wrote: "The defendents distribute and support software, the users of which can and do chose to employ it for both lawful and unlawful means.
Grokster and Stream Cast are not different from companies that sell home video recorders or copying machines, both of which can and are used to infringe copyrights. "This judgment came comes after last year's verdict in Netherlands, which found similarly for another popular file swapping utility called Kazaa".
Together these two decisions hold out the hope that judiciaries worldwide will take the trouble to examine the implications of emerging technologies before trying to interpret them in the light of laws that were made in an earlier era.
Software tools like Morpheus, Grokster and Kazaa are different in one important respect from the model followed by Napster — indeed they demonstrate the gradual evolution of what is being called P2P — shorthand for Peer-to-Peer or Person-to-Person computing.
Napster was a direct descendent of the well-known Client-Server scenario. It provided a central entity, its own server, which acted as a clearing house for information between the users or clients. Thus it was at best a hybrid of the Client-Server and the emerging Peer-to-Peer topologies. This was its `Achilles heel' — and the music companies hammered on the point that Napster had on its server, the full history of every file swap transaction between two users.
It could be said to be an active participant if not a catalyst for whatever the users did — and thus participated in the illegality if any of the file exchange. Later clones of Napster like the ones which stood accused in last week's case, adopted what is known as a `Pure P2P' model: Here, there is no central entity and contacts are made directly between the PCs of different users on the Web.
They used software like Morpheus, Grokster or Kazaa — but the parent companies had no way of knowing what customers did with them. The judge in LA could appreciate the crucial difference. One likely fallout is that the idea of P2P will become increasingly attractive. The swapping of music files was a small and trivial application, which panicked an insecure music industry into overreaction.
P2P is being recognised as something fundamentally good; something that sees the Internet play its legitimate role as a great levelling force, converting the world into a huge commune and removing barriers and inequalities that divide nations. The idea of linking the power of millions of separate computers to address a mammoth task of global importance has already captured the imagination of many.
Typical of the many research efforts leveraging P2P is the French initiative called XTrem Web - a non-profit open source software effort exploring the possibilities of global computing. Biotech players are already leveraging P2P and its near cousins, Distributed Computing and Cluster Computing to solve massive problems, which are beyond the computational resources of any one agency.
The recently completed Human Genome Project as well as other initiatives in the fight against cancer or anthrax and other killers have all exploited the spare computing power that goes waste in thousands of PCs worldwide. Volunteers allow their machines to be used in spare time and the Net Effect of such collaboration can end up in creating a combined computational power measurable in teraflops.
While the idea is compelling, there remain a number of issues relating to security and privacy that remain unaddressed.
If I allow my PC to become part of a worldwide net trying to solve a worthy problem, am I also allowing a Trojan Horse to slip into my system? How can I, a well intentioned if naïve lay person, judge which project is genuine and which is a nasty exploiter? The promise of P2P is limitless; its perils are apparent and can possibly be remedied.
About 15 years after he coined the phrase `Cyberspace' British novelist William Gibson was asked by Newsweek magazine to assess how the idea had turned out in practice. The Internet, he wrote, "Is truly one of the strangest things we have done as a species. If we take care of it, it may be a step towards a better world".
But he did add a rider. He attributed the success of Internet to the fact that ``it happened largely outside the jurisdiction of politicians".
Today P2P is similarly at a turning point. If it remains outside the jurisdiction of crassly commercial interests be they music publishers or movie mughals and others, it may yet emerge as the first grand idea of the twenty first century.
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