Randomblings Home
Email Me
Pictures
RSS feed
My Resume
Newsvine Articles
NEW! Learn Chess With Rich

 Pick a skin:
Please read disclaimer at bottom

Rich's Notes on.....

P2P File Sharing

We're talking about Napster, illegal BitTorrents, and Kazaa, the GNUTELLA networks and the other P2P networks that people trade music and video on, without regard for the copyrights of the artists and/or their agents.

What is P2P
P2P stands for Peer To Peer. A company called Naptser had come out with a client program that connected to central servers which indexed the shared file collection of its connected clients. This made the company an easy target to be assaulted and shut down, because the central servers were a necessary component of the file sharing network. Realizing this fault, another group of software geeks created Gnutella, which was a client based upon a meshed network structure. File requests and searches were served by 'nearest neighbor' algorithms, and routing on the network was changed on the fly as people joined the network. Kazaa and BearShare and countless other clients use this model, called peer to peer file sharing.

Lies about P2P and MP3
  • By making an MP3 copy of a song and sharing it with your friends, you're making an exact duplicate of the file.
    The MP3 format is a compressed format file - and does not contain all of the audio information that is included on a 44,000 samples/second digital sample that is published on the CD. In fact, some MP3 creation algorithms are better than others, even at the same bitrate, and your quality will differ even within this same format. Anyone who has listened to an hour of MP3's and then put in a CD will be able to detect the improved quality of the CD format. Yes, you can burn a CD from the MP3, but that original audio recording's fidelity is gone, and can never be recoved. This is why it's called 'lossy' compression.
Truths about P2P
  • It is illegal to make an recording of a song and share it with your friends and acquaintances.
Misperceptions / Myths
  • They play the song on the radio - that's the same thing - you could just record it from there.
    Yes, but the radio station provides a payment for every song on their playlist that goes back to the artists. Until micropayments are integrated into the P2P file sharing, and those payments are regulated and collected by the right people, you are trouncing on the rights of those same people to collect those fees.
  • Filesharing is wrong.
    No it isn't - there's absolutely nothing illegal about filesharing, and BitTorrent and P2P network solutions are the Internet of tomorrow. P2P solutions offer bandwith to companies and individuals who cannot afford to pay for that bandwith when the files they wish to share are popular enough. What is wrong is sharing certain types of files with others, files that you do not have distribution rights for.
Up in the Air
Resources



Disclaimer:
The accuracy of the data in these notes, while not considerably suspect, are based upon my own, personal comprehension of the research and facts that I have done. Their truth is not guaranteed, your results may vary, and I may just be completely wrong.....though I doubt it.