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Peer to peer (P2P) has been around for a long time now. Big software, music and movie corporations are against the piracy it forests, users love it and pirates thrive on the notoriety it brings them. In our networked society, P2P accounts for the majority of the chit-chat (data transfer) globally. Studies have revealed that P2P networks, especially BitTorrent, accounts for over half the bandwidthy used globally; so much so that standard Web surfing (HTTP) is nowhere in the same league.
So what’s behind all the exabytes of data that’s changes hard drives across the globe? Why is P2P so popular, and how will it changes the future of the Net?
ADVANTAGES
P2P networks are actually a great boon, especially to open source content creators. Consider this: you are a software developer; you magnanimously decide to create a useful application without wanting to see sell it commercially (for example, a Linux distro ). You spend months (if not years) developing it, at your own costs, and now find that in order to share it with the world, you will have to incur further costs of buying Web hosting bandwidth. God help wallet if your software is as popular as say, the Ubuntu Linux distro. With millions of people downloading the 700MB odd CD image, you’re certainly going to get a big bandwidth bill every month.
However thanks to P2P, you have an option. First you find some friends who have fat pipes at home or work, get them to download the software from you, then make a Torrent, upload it to a popular legal torrent site (or just host it on your own site),and instead of millions of people downloading 700 MB each,you get millions of people downloading a small 7KB.torrent file each and then downloading the 700MB from your friends who are also hosting the file. Plus ,the more people that finish downloading the file, the more “speeder” you have and the less the strain is on the original hoster’s bandwidth ! thus , communities are born! Apart from saving tons of hard cash in bandwidth costs,P2P can help you develop a community, quite like a forum does; and then there are the ideas that don’t involve any file sharing at all!
P2P With A Difference
Have you heard of skype? Again, if u haven’t, Google it, read the first link, come back…
So by now you should know how big a revolution skype started in terms of voice over IP (VolP). The difference between skype and all the other VoIP solutions before it was the fact that skype was designed to beP2P software,and in fact,comes from the same people who game us KaZaA! This means that skype can sustain millions of users, with hardly any infrastructure cost. In fact,the more user it has,the cheaper the bandwidth per person on the network-in true P2P style! Here, instead of files,user are helping each other “talk” to other skype users across the globe by exchanging data packets that carry voice.
Red Swoosh (www.redswoosh.net) offers P2P-style sharing of large multimedia content or files. All you have to do is install the client software, and when you click on a “Swooshed” link, you get to download the content from other people who have also downloaded the same file. If you want to pay for huge bandwidth costs,this might be the way to go.
There are many more such ideas, all involving P2P, and all quite legal and helpful.
We Want To Be Entertained
Games, movies and music are the prime sources of entertainment for most of us, and thanks to P2P, albeit quite illegally, we find whatever we like online, for “free”. With broadband becoming a reality in India, for those who are willing to pay for it, the latest in entertainment is just a few clicks and few hours of downloading away. Piracy was never easier!
Though the most popular way of legal distribution via P2P is currently BitTorrent, unfortunately, it is also the most popular for illegal pirated content s well!
Be it music, movies, the latest games and even software, it’s all easily available. For us Indians, this is the icing on the cake! Most of us refuse to pay for what we can, and essentially get for “free”. Ignorance of the laws plays a part here, but honestly, most of us just don’t give a hoot for “foreign” laws. As far as software is concerned, we at digit have got thousands of mails regarding piracy, with the general sentiment divided: one camp feels piracy is the fault of the software manufactures, who price their software too high, in accordance with US pricing, instead of pricing it lower to account for the lower average salaries here in India, while others, mostly Open source supporters, say that breaking the piracy laws when good free software is available is just inexcusable! Rather than rekindle this debate, let’s leave software and games out of this and focus on movies and music.
The same argument just do not hold true for entertainment! We cannot blame high price tags for the piracy of movies or music, yet most of us seem to have loads of MP3s and have seen all the latest movies, sometimes even before they’re released in theatres here! The average American pays anywhere from three to five times as much as we do to watch movies in a theatre, and also pays more for music CDs. So what’s our excuse?
