Pablo Soto has been hailed as the Spanish Shawn Fanning: a 23-year-old kid with a knack for coding, a passion for music and a certain brashness in his willingness to take on the record industry.
At least for now, Soto is better known in Europe, where two file-swapping services, Blubster and Piolet, are powered by the MP2P software he created. But he may gain a higher profile in the United States if established services, such as Grokster and iMesh, adopt his unique version of peer-to-peer software.
“I cannot say much,” Soto said in an interview from his parents’ home in Spain. “But I will say that if you go to the rankings of the most downloaded peer-to-peer programs — if you take from the second to the seventh, all of them are talking with me.”
Like Fanning, who started Napster and almost single-handedly launched the online music revolution, Soto is largely a self-taught geek who has been toying with computers since age 8. He has always professed a love of music — and even did a brief stint as the front-man for a Spanish rock group.
It was the Napster revolution that captured his imagination. Soto left his job and retreated to his childhood room, where he began experimenting with Gnutella, open-source file-sharing software in which developers license the core onto which they add their own code. He relied, not on formal instruction, but on books and a virtual support group available through Internet chat sites such as P2Pchat.net.
“The problem was the Internet in Spain was terribly expensive. The only way to connect was through international calls,” he said. His mother pulled the phone line from his room after he ran up astronomical phone bills. “But even then, I still managed to connect,” he said.
Soto began crafting his own file-swapping architecture, using a different file transfer protocol called UDP to move files, instead of the traditional Internet TCP protocol. It is a “connectionless” protocol that doesn’t reveal the individual addresses of each computer connected to the network, affording users a certain degree of anonymity.
He calls his software MP2P. And he created Blubster, a file-swapping service created, and since sold, as a proof of concept. It has been downloaded 3.5 million times on CNet’s download.com Web site — and attracted the notice of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the European affiliate of the Recording Industry Association of America.
Soto seems unafraid of being hauled into court. He said he expects to be threatened. Indeed, he is almost defiant.
“Sooner or later, I’ll have to defend myself in court,” Soto said. “But whatever. I am a developer. And nobody’s going to stop me from writing code or, with my pen and paper, drawing little circles like ISPs and lines like connections,” he added, referring to popular schematics showing how peer-to-peer architectures work.
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