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2004-12-26

Legitimizing P2P, Maybe?

ACM News Service: P2P Battle Reaches FTC.  I stepped over this blurb the first time, and saw it again because there is no 2004-12-24 edition of ACM News Service.  It landed differently one week later.

There is the possibility of a form of P2P responsibility based on FTC regulations for truth in labeling and some additional practices around discouraging IP-violations and extra- if not illegal activity.  Although there is no result from the U.S. Supreme Court examination of the Grokster case, the FTC involvement might provide an appropriate level of warning and compliance to permit ad hoc P2P to continue to flourish for lawful purposes.  That matters to me because I see P2P and distributed overlay discovery as important for use of distributed objects in the long run.

Michael Grebb's 2004-12-16 Wired News article gives more flavor to the proceedings of the two-day FTC workshop held on December 15-16.  It seems that everyone is worried about the previous decision that requires substantial non-infringing use, with publishers looking at what the usage actually is, the P2P providers countering how application-neutral the technology is.  There is also a little gaming that went on, when I saw a number of blogs encouraging the publishing and downloading of public-domain materials via popular P2P services as a way of demonstrating that neutrality in practice.  (My sense is that this sort of thing rarely works and it demonstrates a kind of prima facie guilty knowledge.)

I would like to see P2P find a way into the light, and I don't know that will be possible.  For my interests, it means being able to work with high-performance P2P privately but maybe have to use a Web Services model for the broader public case, assuming that this allows individual services to be dealt with, if they deliver illegal or misappropriated content, without the entire Web Service infrastructure being threatened.

Legitimizing Peer-to-Peer

ACM News Service: Peer-to-Peer Comes Clean.  2004-10-09: There are many positive approaches to P2P and the article described here indicates a number of them.  One of interest to me is LionShare from Penn State University, at least in terms of the idea of exchanging scholarly information among networks of academics.

I'm not sure about distributed hash tables as an interesting activity, but I am certainly enrolled in approaches to automatic discovery that "store data redundantly on numerous machines, shield information with encryption and digital signatures, and sustain participants' motivation and honesty by supporting distributed reputation, trust, and payment systems."

Simson Garfinkel's 2004-10-06 Technology Review article provides a link to the September 2003 LionShare proposal. Other useful links provide the Microsoft P2P Development kit, the August 2004 Fourth IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing, and something I need here on the Centrale LAN, Magic Mirror Backup.  Of course, it will take something before I give anything like that local-network privileges inside my residential firewall and router.

posted by orcmid at 12/26/2004 10:43:08 PM, rating data by NewsGator Online