Remember the glory days of Napster? The file-sharing service was trumpeted as online democracy at its best, with 55m people using it to swap music from bands as diverse as Steps and Sepultura. Then the nasty Recording Industry Association of America stepped in and brought Napster to court for copyright infringement. It won its case, and the music wasn't free any more.
Well, Napster is back on track, according to its new chief executive, Konrad Hilbers. Before you rush off to download the latest track from Kylie or Kraftwerk, take note of Hilbers' words to tech leaders last week. He said he firmly believes in what Napster stands for, which he defined as "making available things like my children's Christmas carol singing".
The Hilbers children must be some sort of Ëber von Trapps if Konrad believes their warbling can entice millions of former Napster users back to the file-sharing service. The Napster we knew and loved is now much reduced, soon to become a subscription-based service lacking any great volume of music for sharing, as its former users have migrated to other free file-sharing applications such as Gnutella, Audiogalaxy, BearShare, and LimeWire.
The legacy of Napster, however, may well feature more highly in tech history books than the service itself. Napster is a peer-to-peer (P2P) application, meaning that the music files its users swap are not stored on a central server, but on the users' individual computers. Any user can download any music file from any other user's computer, provided the other user is logged in to Napster at the time.
Napster was not the first P2P application, by any means. The internet itself was originally a P2P application. Before the introduction of browsers and central web servers, internet users exchanged files directly.
But Napster was the P2P poster child, bursting on to the scene just as the internet population reached the critical mass necessary to make it a success. Shawn Fanning's brainchild brought P2P to the fore and countless start-ups hopped on the bandwagon. Last year alone, venture capitalists invested over $500m in new P2P companies.
One of the main business applications of P2P is decentralised collaboration, which allows people in different locations to work together on projects. Others include distributed search and information sharing, and distributed processing, which harnesses the computing power of thousands of individual PCs so they work as one supercomputer.
New P2P firms tend to be fancifully named. Many could be characters from the next Harry Potter book: Yenta, Oculus, Rapigator, Ogg Vorbis, Pandango and Jabberzilla. Many will also have gone out of business by the time the next Harry Potter book is published.
The current downturn means that fallout is as inevitable in P2P as in any other technology sector, and even more likely with the recent arrival of Intel, Sun and Microsoft onto the scene.
Although the behemoths may swallow up the baby firms, or force them out of business, they also lend a credibility to P2P that it previously lacked. Medium-sized firms are starting to see P2P as a legitimate business application, rather than something used by slackers and students to share songs. The research firm Frost & Sullivan recently reported that more than 60,000 business users now use P2P networks, and predicted that number would rise to 6.2bn by 2007. It also says revenues from the enterprise P2P market will reach $42.8m this year, and $4.53bn by 2007.
For this forecast to bear out, however, P2P developers need to overcome a number of hurdles, security issues being the major obstacle. Current P2P applications do not guard adequately against viruses or the theft of digital assets. P2P developers must also tackle the lack of common standards, the need to protect copyright, and the possible inability of individual PCs and networks to withstand a huge volume of file exchange traffic.
Assuming these problems can be overcome, P2P looks set to change the face of computing, and not just for businesses. Individuals will be able to use P2P applications for things as diverse as online learning and multi-player gaming. But thus far it has been non-profit organisations that have made the most of P2P. The best known is SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Participants in the SETI@home project are asked to download free software which allows SETI to make use of spare processing power on their home PCs.
To date, 3.2m internet users have donated 700,000 years' worth of processing power to help in the quest for aliens. If there are aliens out there, they had better get packing to a galaxy far, far away, or they will be tracked down any day now.
Other non-profit projects are using P2P to find a cure for cancer, to analyse the human genome, or to solve complex mathematical problems. And these non-profit projects are the greatest proof that P2P is really a technology for our time. In society and in politics, decentralisation and international collaboration between like-minded individuals are overarching themes, most evident in the anti-capitalist and environmentalist movements.
P2P is the technological sibling of these movements. At best, it could revolutionise business processes and help scientists find a cure for cancer. At worst, we will be swapping audio files of the Hilbers' children's greatest hits with our new-found friends on Mars.
• Kathy Foley is the editor of Nua.com, which reports on internet trends and statistics.
• Comments to online.feedback@theguardian.com
Useful links
Recording Industry Association of America
