For something that sounds like so much technology jargon and hype, peer-to-peer technology (P2P) is the fastest-growing idea in the history of computing. Napster, the first P2P application to come to popular attention, went from nothing to 30m users in less than a year,
Its successors are even more popular: 2bn files a month are being transferred over the FastTrack system used by Morpheus and Kazaa. Peter Chernin, president of News Corporation, told a Financial Times conference this week that 1m movie files were downloaded illegally every day. But P2P technology is much bigger than the file sharing services that first brought it to public attention and its new uses could be even more revolutionary.
The power of the internet reinforces the concept of distributed computing. This allows the spare computing power inside home PCs to be used by those who need it. For example, medical research takes vast amounts of computing power. Instead of buying a supercomputer, many companies are using the spare power of thousands of volunteers who participate in everything from research into cancer and Aids vaccines to the testing of strong codes, and the search for extraterrestrial life, just by downloading a small program and running it in the background.
With P2PQ, a British P2P project currently in development, users can have a small P2P application with a list of keywords on specialist subjects. Users can then ask questions via the P2PQ website, which are routed to the relevant specialist. Instant messaging services are also being enhanced by P2P.
Jabber is an instant messaging system that uses P2P to pass messages between users and is rapidly gaining popularity. It is also being heavily developed as a system for allowing applications to talk to people, and to each other. This person-to-application concept allows you to speak to an application on one computer, that may in turn deliver information it gets from many others. Why not, for example, use Jabber to talk to another machine running a file sharing service?
With some language understanding built in, typing "find me a Kylie Minogue video" into your instant messenger application could eventually deliver cavorting hotpants to your screen, all without the need for a centralised service. It is this decentralisation that is particularly fascinating to the P2P developers. P2P topology - the way the networks of P2P applications create themselves, and change shape over time, is a new and complex field of study, but one that points out the special nature of P2P networks: truly decentralised systems can't be shut down.
P2P networks that rely on some central servers can, however, and this is what happened to Napster last year. Although users transferred their MP3s directly between themselves, the search facility required a central server. It was this that was shutdown by court order. All might not be lost for the P2P music services. On January 16, judge Marilyn Patel, presiding over the case between Napster and the Record
ing Industry Association of America, granted Napster leave to explore whether the labels were colluding to prevent it licensing music for online distribution - and if the record companies' copyright extends online anyway. Meanwhile, Morpheus and Grokster, two companies that use a much more decentralised system to allow the sharing of any type of file, and not just MP3s, are in court on March 4 under the same charges. Their defence, however, is a lot more radical. Because, they say, their network is not specifically for sharing music, if they are guilty of facilitating copyright theft, so must the internet Service providers, and the makers of multimedia software.
The Grokster filing says: "The 'network' at issue here is the internet itself ... [But the media companies] do not contend that Microsoft is contributorily liable simply because virtually every music pirate in the world uses Microsoft's software, or that AOL is contributorily liable simply because millions of its users connect to the internet and steal music through AOL's network." If anything, this defence is a perfect example of the philosophy behind P2P, and the real post dot.com spirit of the internet. Rather than a place where millions of users all connect to a handful of large sites, the internet is rapidly reclaiming its status as a place where everyone talks to everyone else, equal to equal, peer to peer.
