Shawn Fanning’s 1999 release of Napster forever associated peer-to-peer technology with music piracy, and we all bear the burden of that curse today. Why do I call it a curse? Because p2p can and will be used in far more powerful ways that for distributing copyrighted works, and its inclusion in the incredibly boring copyright squabbles is downright disrespectful to the technology’s potential.
I will continue to hammer home the point that peer-to-peer is about efficiently pooling the resources of all internetworked computers around the world. Folding@home is a fantastic example of this potential. So is Skype, and so is Vonage. Vonage, you say? That’s a new one. Why would I include Vonage in a list of p2p applications? Because Vonage is a service for connecting your computer directly with the person you’re calling, just as Napster connected your computer directly to the person you were downloading from. The RIAA does not want you to think about Vonage when you think about p2p. They want you to think about Napster, to “tar [all p2p applications] with the ‘Napster’ brush”, as Joshua Wattles put it in the MGM v. Grokster amicus brief in the district court. As critical thinkers, we need to break out of this cage.
Now, Robert Cringely might disagree with my use of the term “peer-to-peer” in this context. The wide variety of applications in the wild smudges the lines delineating peer-to-peer, grid computing, and distributed computing, however. My purpose is not to say I am correct versus Cringely in my definition of peer-to-peer. Peer-to-peer on some level means whatever I or Cringely or anyone else says it means. I am talking about p2p as any system that enables a direct network connection between peers that were exclusively clients in the traditional client/server architecture. I think the definition has to be this general given the breathtaking diversity of applications in the field.
Nevertheless, Napster shined a spotlight on what to me is one of the most boring aspects of p2p — using it to distribute the overwhelmingly putrid crap coming out of Hollywood and the music studios. If the first p2p application to explode in the mainstream had been a distributed computing project that found a cure for breast cancer or if SETI@home had actually discovered extra-terrestrial life, the rhetoric surrounding the technology would be far different today. Instead we started in the gutter with Napster.
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Sorry soulxtc! I disagree with you on problems with Napster & others a curse. The problems from the beginning was entertainment industry did not try to change with the technologies & the Internet as a whole. Their lack of willingness to change is costing them dearly so like any other business they are passing on the so called “profit losses” on to us. Period! I’ve not bought any CDs for years not because I download them I just don’t care about them.