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Friday, March 3, 2006
A Pandora’s box full of file sharing
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Limewire? Gnutella? BitTorrent? Azureus? Kazaa? eMule?
If you are a parent and listen closely, you will likely hear your teen child mention them. Don’t worry, they are not drugs, but they are just as addictive, and likely are being used illegally in your home.
What are they?
They are computer programs used to “share” digital files, music primarily, between two computers connected via the World Wide Web. This is called peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing and almost everyone who uses P2P does so to illegally download music, movies, TV shows, games, software.
If anyone was making money off P2P, it would be big business. I have seen some estimates that claim 50 percent of all Internet traffic can be attributed to P2P file sharing. That’s a lot of sharing/stealing.
How does it work?
Napster was the first famous P2P client. It was a small program that, once you fired it up, made your home computer capable of communicating with a powerful computer (called a server) on the Internet that kept track of what files everyone was sharing. For example, if I hooked up to Napster and had a Beatles song in my sharing folder, the server would tell anyone searching for that Beatles song that I had it. With a simple click, the file could be copied over the Internet.
This is, of course, illegal. After an Icarus-like existence, Napster was shut down by the courts.
As other were quick to notice, the central database for song titles was what legally doomed Napster.
With an estimated 100 million Napster users experiencing MP3 withdrawal and the dreaded malady known as “twitchy mouse finger,�? it didn’t take long for new P2P clients to emerge.
The new clients were different. Instead of employing one centralized server, every client was now capable of figuring out (called indexing) what files were available on the network. Unlike Napster, this de-centralized network cannot be shut down by turning off one corporate-owned server. Now, the clients themselves maintain the network and are installed in millions of homes.
Good luck getting the courts to shut that down.
There are different file-sharing protocols, which are simply the different rules computers use to exchange information. The most famous protocol is Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which explains why web site addresses always start with “http.”
To view this web page, your computer requested http information from a web server. Since they both used the same protocol, the information was quickly transferred.
The first file-sharing protocol to get a lot of ink after Napster was Gnutella, which was named after the exotic hoofed animal, the Gnu “free software” Project, and the famous hazelnut spread programmers have been known to live on.
Limewire is probably the best Gnutella client. It works well with small files. The weakness of the Gnutella protocol is that large files cannot be shared until they are completely downloaded. So, if you have downloaded half a song, no one can download the bits you have until your download is complete.
So BitTorrent came along. BitTorrent chops each file into hundreds or thousands of smaller packages. If you have downloaded half a movie, others can download the bits you have while you are still in the process of getting the complete file. This makes the network a lot more efficient because no one has to wait for one download to finish before another can begin.
Azureus is a good BitTorrent client.
BitTorrent clients are unusual in that they are not standalone applications, they require information from an external source to know where the sought after download is on the Internet. If you want to download a TV show, for example, you have to first find it via a BitTorrent search engine, typically a web site like IsoHunt.com, ThePirateBay.com, TorrentSpy.com, all of which seem to be funded by porn site advertisements.
This is officially the “dark side” of the Internet, not for the easily offended. In a plot twist of the morality play that is modern America, I have heard parents complain they were more upset their child was exposed to nudity than they were with their children for downloading music illegally.
BitTorrent search engines come and go as fast as the lawyers can file lawsuits, which, I can assure you, is not nearly as fast as a new website can be created. The lawyers are fighting a losing battle.
What’s my take on “sharing?”
I know it is wrong, but I think most people are going to keep doing it. I think people are going to keep doing it in such large numbers that it will eventually cause a dramatic shift in the way companies do business.
The distribution and profit model of the recording industry is tied to an antiquated system. Filing lawsuits is expensive and slow, the Internet is cheap and fast.
Times have changed and so must the industry giants. If not, even they will be felled by the millions of Gnutella-slinging Davids.
