Supporters of peer-to-peer networking services (P2P) have had a rough year. Napster has been beleaguered by lawsuits from all sides since even before its service became widely known. And Napster users were called thieves by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)
Supporters of next-generation P2P services like Gnutella and Freenet have similarly been seen as greedy schemers, looking to continue these wicked practices even after Napster itself is dead.
But lately things have seemed to change.
At a developer conference in August, Intel CTO Pat Gelsinger called P2P "the next computing frontier." Still, though Gnutella and Napster proponents took notice, Gelsinger's declaration didn't do much to improve the legal climate surrounding P2P.
Then, two months later Napster inked a partnership with German company Bertelsmann AG. Under the deal, songs from Bertelsmann-owned record labels like RCA and Arista are to be served on Napster's network, in exchange for royalties.
Does the Napster-Bertelsmann agreement, then, represent the first cracks in the dam? Are the winds of P2P's legal fortunes about to shift? Can we soon all expect to be using P2P networking services extensively, fulfilling the promise Gelsinger foresaw in August?
I doubt it.
For one thing, few among the current crop of P2P applications have matured to the level of mainstream acceptance. The first to market, Napster, has enjoyed the most success -- owing partially to media coverage and the antics of Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich. But none of the successors and "Napster killers" rumored to be in the works has yet to truly materialize.
The popular runner-up had been Gnutella, a protocol that doesn't rely on central directory servers the way Napster does. But as more users began to sign on to the Gnutella network during its beta phase, the more evident it became that the fledgling protocol wasn't capable of scaling to accommodate heavy traffic. Gnutella's development community is fragmented and lacks clear direction, and so a successful resolution to these problems seems unlikely.
Freenet is another hopeful. But development of the Freenet software is moving so slowly that it seems questionable whether it will ever truly get off the ground, and its heavy focus on user anonymity seems more catered to underground political activists than to the casual music trader.
Meanwhile, a host of others wait in the wings, with names like CuteMX, iMesh, Songspy, Filetopia and Kazaa. So far, though, none have enjoyed the popularity of Napster. And with P2P networking, popularity is what it's all about. It's kind of a Catch-22: P2P file sharing services are rarely worth using until a lot of people are using them, providing the content.
Right now, overall demand for P2P services seems high. That demand might be enough to increase the popularity of some of this new software. But the real question is: How long will overall demand for P2P be sustainable, in light of the Napster-Bertelsmann deal?
Napster gained its notoriety because the vast majority of its users traded MP3s of copyrighted songs, invoking the ire of the RIAA. To say that the RIAA argued against distributing songs over a P2P network like Napster, however, is a red herring. What they argued was that unauthorized distribution of songs in the MP3 format wasn't acceptable, period.
A Web site hosting a large catalog of copyright-infringing MP3s would quickly be shut down, and its owner possibly prosecuted, by the major record labels. On the other hand, the somewhat anonymous nature of P2P networking makes it much easier for traders to dodge the RIAA's wrath -- especially with Napster bearing the burden of defending the practice in court. So long as unauthorized trading of copyrighted MP3s remains illegal, and no alternative exists, P2P is the way to go.
But suppose the major labels decided that distributing music via MP3 is not such a bad thing? Napster's recent deal with Bertelsmann seems to indicate that this is at least a possibility. In such a "legalized" marketplace, the P2P model hardly seems like the best way to get the job done.
Picture any P2P music-sharing network as a giant flea market, filled with folding tables of various sizes. On each table is a selection of songs from different artists. Some of the songs are well labeled and conveniently packaged, while others might be unclear, garbled or truncated.
It might take longer to get the same song from one table than from another. Collecting an entire album from one artist might mean going to several tables. And it's up to you to sort through all this information to find what you want.
Now imagine you're a major music company, like Bertelsmann-owned BMG, that has decided to release tracks by its artists as MP3s. Is this flea market environment really the way you want to present your properties to the consumer? Wouldn't you rather present a single, branded storefront hosting your entire catalog of music in the same location?
That way, rather than scouring the net for individual tracks, fans would always know where to go to find music by their favorite artists. They could be assured the reliable bandwidth of heavy-duty commercial network connections. And they would know that what they were getting would always be a complete, authentic, clear-sounding original.
Using a centralized system, music companies would also have a better opportunity to market their catalogs. With Web-based delivery, customers could be told about new releases from both established and up-and-coming artists whenever they visit the site. By comparison, even when armed with a search feature, P2P users generally must know precisely what they want before they can get it.
About the only advantage P2P brings to this equation is that it dramatically lessens the need for the record labels to maintain expensive around-the-clock file servers. Instead, the legwork is shunted off onto their customers. That saves the labels money -- but not much. And that kind of cost-savings is hardly the type of thing that's liable to impress current Napster users.
All things being equal, and with the question of legality removed, most music traders would probably gladly opt for the convenience, ease-of-use, and reliability of traditional client-server delivery over any P2P network. It's not Napster they want; it's the content Napster brings them.
And the decision the RIAA faces is not whether to support Napster, but whether to make that content readily available. So, as it turns out, the preeminent source of P2P hoopla isn't about P2P at all.
But what about the rest of the hype? Does this mean Pat Gelsinger is wrong -- that there's no future for P2P networking? Well -- no, it doesn't. P2P in one form or another will probably be around for a long time to come, just as it's been around for a long time already.
Far and away the most widely accepted P2P file sharing solutions in use right now are the ones already built into desktop operating systems. Microsoft Networking and the Mac OS's Personal File Sharing are both P2P protocols, and both work over the Internet.
The new generation of P2P software has built upon such established networking schemes, adding network-wide search and directory features. Even more interesting are distributed-content schemes, such as those used by Freenet and the Mojo Nation software. In these systems, content is stored on no single machine, but instead is scattered throughout the entire network.
We'll probably all benefit from these types of developments sometime in the future. But in the meantime, as for P2P as a bona fide commercial-grade buzzword: forget it.
Think of the "push technology" of a few years ago. In 1996, PointCast and its competitors gave us a full year of marketing telling us that "push" was the next thing, that it would even replace the browser itself. And then, by 1997: nothing.
Back then, some analysts whispered that the aggressive marketing push for "push" might have actually hurt its popularity with consumers. That as a technology, it just wasn't as exciting as everyone was told.
If the music industry keeps heading toward digital content delivery, then I predict a similar popularity backlash to the current hype surrounding P2P, coming soon. (And remember, for P2P services, popularity is everything.)
Expect the year 2000's version of the P2P revolution to go down the same way the "push" revolution did: a victim of its own hype.
