Tag: Peer-to-Peer
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Cost Tradeoffs of P2P
On Thursday, I jumped in to a bloggic discussion of the tradeoffs between centrally-controlled and peer-to-peer design strategies in distributed systems. (See posts by Randy Picker (with comments from Tim Wu and others), Lior Strahilevitz, me, and Randy Picker again.) We’ve agreed, I think, that large-scale online services will be designed as distributed systems, and…
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"Centralized" Sites Not So Centralized After All
There’s an conversation among Randy Picker, Tim Wu, and Lior Strahilevitz over the U. Chicago Law School Blog about the relative merits of centralized and peer-to-peer designs for file distribution. (Picker post with Wu comments; Strahilevitz post) Picker started the discussion by noting that photo sharing sites like Flickr use a centralized design, rather than…
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eDonkey Seeks Record Industry Deal
Derek Slater points to last week’s Senate hearing testimony by Sam Yagan, President of MetaMachine, the distributor of the popular eDonkey peer-to-peer file sharing software. The hearing’s topic was “Protecting Copyright and Innovation in a Post-Grokster World”. Had the Supreme Court drawn a clearer legal line in its Grokster decision, we wouldn’t have needed such…
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P2P Still Growing; Traffic Shifts to eDonkey
CacheLogic has released a new report presentation on peer-to-peer traffic trends, based on measurement of networks worldwide. (The interesting part starts at slide 5.) P2P traffic continued to grow in 2005. As expected, there was no dropoff after the Grokster decision. Traffic continues to shift away from the FastTrack network (used by Kazaa and others),…
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Aussie Judge Tweaks Kazaa Design
A judge in Australia has found Kazaa and associated parties liable for indirect copyright infringement, and has tentatively imposed a partial remedy that requires Kazaa to institute keyword-based filtering. The liability finding is based on a conclusion that Kazaa improperly “authorized” infringement. This is roughly equivalent to a finding of indirect (i.e. contributory or vicarious)…
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Back in the Saddle
Hi, all. I’m back from a lovely vacation, which included a stint camping in Sequoia / King’s Canyon National Park, beyond the reach of Internet technology. In transit, I walked right by Jack Valenti in the LA airport. He looked as healthy as ever, and more relaxed than in his MPAA days. Blogging will resume…
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DMCA, and Disrupting the Darknet
Fred von Lohmann’s paper argues that the DMCA has failed to keep infringing copies of copyrighted works from reaching the masses. Fred argues that the DMCA has not prevented “protected” files from being ripped, and that once those files are ripped they appear on the darknet where they are available to everyone. I think Fred…
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Entertainment Industry Pretending to Have Won Grokster Case
Most independent analysts agree that the entertainment industry didn’t get what it wanted from the Supreme Court’s Grokster ruling. Things look grim for the Grokster defendants themselves; but what the industry really wanted from the Court was a ruling that a communication technologies that are widely used to infringe should not be allowed to exist,…
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RIAA Saber-Rattling against Antispoofing Technologies?
The RIAA has fired a shot across the bow of P2P companies whose products incorporate anti-spoofing technologies, according to a story (subscribers only) in Friday’s National Journal Tech Daily, by Sarah Lai Stirland. The statement came at a Washington panel on the implications of the Grokster decision. “There’s definitely a lot of spoofing going on…
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Posner and Becker, Law and Economics
Richard Posner and Gary Becker turn their bloggic attention to the Grokster decision this week. Posner returns to the argument of his Aimster opinion. Becker is more cautious. After reiterating the economic arguments for and against indirect liability, Posner concludes: There is a possible middle way that should be considered, and that is to provide…