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In January last, Warner Bros in the USA announced a service called In2Movies which is to provide secure and legal P2P delivery of films and TV series. There are 'legitimised' P2P providers such as iMesh, Mashboxx and Playloader. In Germany, Warner also announced an arrangement with a German mobile entertainment company to distribute ln2Movies on a 'download-to-own' basis, using a P2P network.

Strange and menacing beasts have been stalking the Internet jungle for several years now, with exotic names like Napster, Grokster, Gnutella, KaZaA, BitTorrent, eDonkey, Peer Impact, Soribada and FastTrack. The names sound like something out of Jurassic Park - unless, of course, you belong to what the marketers call the 'Always On Generation', in which case they will be familiar names. They are all examples of P2P networks - Peer-to-Peer file sharing, a means whereby (hitherto) Internet users have been able to move audio and video between themselves - without paying.

Napster was the first to create a furore by what it did, back in 2000. Since then, these beasts have been hunted down and killed off, one by one, by the guardians of copyright and commercial orthodoxy in the entertainment industry. But is 2006 the year in which this type of Internet use will 'come in from the cold' and enter mainstream and fully legal commercial development?

There are many signs that this is happening, with potentially momentous consequences both for the carriers of Internet traffic, in particular ISPs, and for those who provide what is crudely called 'content'. In the process, the Internet may be transformed into a new medium for broadcasting both video programming and live events, so forcing the issue of the rivalry between the TV set and the home computer for supremacy in the living room - and the development of mobile TV.

The fundamental principle of P2P offers, at least potentially, a large-scale method of broadcasting that has a low marginal cost and uses spare capacity in the Internet structure i.e. at its periphery, to distribute the huge volumes of data implied by live streaming of TV, films and real-time events. For it is video, the 'sharing' of film and TV material, that will, say the experts, be the main driver of P2P, rather than music, as in the early days of this 'rogue' technology.

The Internet is essentially built on the principle of 'core-to-edge distribution', with high capacity data centres, a large core, and a small edge, with an asymmetrical traffic flow i.e. much more data comes down the pipe to the user than goes back up it. In principle, what P2P does is to shift the job of distribution to the Internet access network, in other words, the Internet Service Providers (ISPs), by setting up connections between users. In other words, files travel round the edge of the Internet system, rather than across its core.

The history of P2P warfare

As recently as late 2004, Dan Glickman, president and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), accused such P2P sites of being 'Internet thieves ... illegally trading valuable copyrighted materials on-line ... illegal file-swappers ... stealing', and warned them 'you can click but you can't hide'.

If you look up Grokster on the web, you are immediately confronted with the web page warning reproduced opposite - a no-nonsense threat of prosecution. A lawyer speaking at the Financial Times conference said that in the USA, up to the end of 2005, over 15,500 law suits had been filed against individuals using one or other of these file-sharing softwares, with over 3,800 outside the USA.

In the USA, the Supreme Court rules against Grokster. In Australia, a federal court rules against KaZaA, in South Korea a court ruled against Soribada. There is, he said, still at least one site 'at large' - called 'allofMP3.com', and that is based in Russia. But in the UK, the High Court has recently imposed fines on two people convicted of illegally swapping files using P2P networks. The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) has settled with many other infringers and is still pursuing a lot more. In Ireland, a High Court has ordered several Internet carriers to disclose details of various people suspected of illegal P2P file transfers of music.

Winning the battle - but losing the war?

But despite this legal activity, the genie was, as they say, out of the bottle. Every time one such site was shut down by the due process of law, another one sprang up, only to be shut down in its turn. It has been, said a conference speaker from CacheLogic, a UK P2P application specialist company, a virtual 'arms race' at the front line of technology on the one hand, and on the other of growing public awareness of the potential of the technology used by such P2P networks.

The question has not been simplified by the fact that different countries have different rules i.e. there was and is no international standard on P2P. In particular, a French court has just recently thrown the cat among the pigeons by ruling against the French phonographic industry organisation and in favour of a user of KaZaA who used that P2P software to download and upload 1,200 copyrighted MP3 files.

The court said that this user had done it for personal use, and not for financial gain, and took roughly the same view as a Canadian court earlier, which said that use of P2P for file swapping was akin to the use of photocopiers for copying books - provided that it was not done for commercial gain but was for personal use, in a limited number of 'copies'.

In other words, the legal situation may not be quite as simple as the defenders of copyright would like it to be, and that may be one reason why the trend in 2006 is that of 'if you can't beat them, join them' - as so often before in the history of entertainment technology.

P2P joins the mainstream?

In mid-2005 the same Dan Glickman was saying:

'peer-to-peer technology is here to stay ... the film industry will have to come up with a reasonablecost, hassle-free way for people to download movies legally', (quoted on the CacheLogic web site).

In January last, Warner Bros in the USA announced a service called In2Movies which is to provide secure and legal P2P delivery of films and TV series. There are 'legitimised' P2P providers such as iMesh, Mashboxx and Playloader. In Germany, Warner also announced an arrangement with a German mobile entertainment company to distribute ln2Movies on a 'download-to-own' basis, using a P2P network. Warner sees this, it is reported, as a way of countering the illegal and heavily used P2P networks active in Germany.

In the UK, the cable operator NTL has announced a trial of a video download service in partnership with BitTorrent, which provides the P2P technology, and CacheLogic, which provides so-called 'caching' technology to help move the files around more efficiently. BitTorrent was once regarded as 'enemy number one' by the guardians of US copyright. Now, there is an agreement between BitTorrent and the MPAA (the Motion Picture Association of America) to help ensure that only legal' content would be available using its web site. BitTorrent and the MPAA have said that they

'would work together and proactively identify ways to limit access to infringing material available via search engines like the one at BitTorrent.com and to promote constructive innovation in this area'.

As if to emphasise its move to legitimacy, BitTorrent is launching its own so-called 'video store' to sell licensed video material on its own retail site, as a rival to the growing telco IPTV services.

Also in the USA, NBC has begun to licence material to P2P services, in the form of films and TV material available through Peer Impact, through whom EMI Music has agreed to deliver its catalogue of music. In the meantime, another company called iMesh settled with the US rights body for $4 million, and new legitimate P2P operators are entering the scene, such as Mashboxx, Raw Flow and Playloader. So the scene is now changing rapidly.

But not out of the jungle quite yet?

The fact that the MPAA in the USA has just recently launched a new series of attacks against web sites that it regards as illegal, including certain Newsgroup sites and P2P sites based on the Torrent' protocol, shows that the battle between the orthodox and the heterodox is far from over.

One major obstacle for the authorities and industry is how to monitor the handling of these shared files by multiple users. It is not just like a book - demand for copying of books is far less i.e. less demand, and photocopying is more cumbersome.

The job of creating a new legal context in which P2P can safely operate, has yet to be completed. There are distinct issues regarding liability for copyright payment and/or copyright infringement as between three quite distinct groups - individuals who upload and download such files; the software providers; and the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who operate the access networks over which such files are typically transported. P2P has also put yet more emphasis on digital rights management. Microsoft, for one, offers digital rights management software.

At a technical level, the problem may be, according to CacheLogic, that while P2P is in theory supposed to make efficient use of otherwise unused capacity round the periphery of the Internet, in practice it will soak up all this spare capacity as quickly as it is created. It will also shift the burden of distribution onto the access network, potentially making Internet Service Providers into what CacheLogic calls 'bit pipes'.

This is because typical P2P files are large. CacheLogic calculates that most P2P traffic has an average size of over 1GB, and in Asia that figure is over 2.5 GB. The implied numbers are huge.

So the P2P saga is set to continue.

This explanation of the P2P 'generation game' is taken from the CacheLogic website, to which due acknowledgement is made

1. First Generation - Centralized Network

The first generation architecture [of P2P] made use of a number centralized index servers that maintained a database of all the content on the network and clients logged on at any one time. The database is updated whenever a client logs on to or off the network.

2. Second Generation - Decentralised/Distributed Network

Second generation networks adopted a fully decentralised and distributed architecture. Instead of central servers deployed on a network, a user's PC acts an integral part of the network performing the tasks of both an index server, searching locally held resources, and as a router, relaying queries between peers. The query protocol works on a "waterfall" principle. Each peer is directly connected to a number of other peers. This generates very large volumes of search traffic (chatter) as all search requests and responses are relayed from each node to its peers. From a Service Provider's perspective, while the queries are small in size this protocol generates large amounts of upstream and downstream, off-network traffic.

Example: on the basis that a peer is directly connected to eight other peers, each query is first passed on to the eight peers, which disseminate the query on to the 64 peers attached to them. When this is extrapolated, by the sixth iteration of this process one single query will have reached 2,097,152 peers on the network.

3. Third Generation - Hybrid Networks

The third generation architecture is a hybrid of the first two, combining the efficiency and resilience of a centralized network with the stealth characteristics of distributed/ decentralised network. This hybrid architecture deploys a hierarchical structure by establishing a backbone network of SuperNodes (or UltraPeers) that take on the characteristics of a central index server. When a client logs on to the network, it makes a direct connection to a single SuperNode which gathers and stores information about peer and content available for sharing.

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The following is an extract from the very helpful Wikipedia (on-line Internet) encyclopedia entry on P2P

A peer-to-peer (or P2P) computer network is a network that relies on the computing power and bandwidth of the participants in the network rather than concentrating it in a relatively low number of servers. P2P networks are typically used for connecting nodes via largely ad hoc connections.

Such networks are useful for many purposes. Sharing content files containing audio, video, data or anything in digital format is very common, and real time data, such as telephony traffic, is also passed using P2P technology.

A pure peer-to-peer network does not have the notion of clients or servers, but only equal peer nodes that simultaneously function as both "clients" and "servers" to the other nodes on the network. This model of network arrangement differs from the client-server model where communication is usually to and from a central server.

A typical example for a non peer-to-peer file transfer is an FTP server where the client and server programs are quite distinct, and the clients initiate the download/uploads and the servers react to and satisfy these requests.

Some networks and channels use a client-server structure for some tasks (e.g., searching) and a peer-to-peer structure for others. [Others] use a peer-to-peer structure for all purposes, and are sometimes referred to as true peer-to-peer networks.

More recently, the concept has achieved recognition in the general public in the context of the absence of central indexing servers in architectures used for exchanging multimedia files. The concept of peer to peer is increasingly evolving to an expanded usage as the relational dynamic active in distributed networks, i.e. not just computer to computer, but human to human. Yochai Benkler has developed the notion of commons-based peer production to denote collaborative projects such as free software.

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Associated with peer production are the concept of peer governance (referring to the manner in which peer production projects are managed) and peer property (referring to the new type of licenses which recognize individual authorship but not exclusive property rights, such as the GNU General Public License and the Creative Commons License).

Advantages of peer-to-peer networks

An important goal in peer-to-peer networks is that all clients provide resources, including bandwidth, storage space, and computing power. Thus, as nodes arrive and demand on the system increases, the total capacity of the system also increases.

The distributed nature of peer-to-peer networks also increases robustness in case of failures by replicating data over multiple peers, and - in pure P2P systems - by enabling peers to find the data without relying on a centralized index server. In the latter case, there is no single point of failure in the system.

When the term peer-to-peer was used to describe the Napster network, it implied that the peer protocol was important, but, in reality, the great achievement of Napster was the empowerment of the peers (i.e., the fringes of the network) in association with a central index, which made it fast and efficient to locate available content. The peer protocol was just a common way to achieve this.

Legal situation

Under U.S. law, "the Betamax decision" case holds that copying "technologies" are not inherently illegal, if substantial non-infringing use can be made of them. This decision, predating the widespread use of the Internet, applies to most data networks, including peer-to-peer networks, since distribution of correctly licensed files can be performed.

Other jurisdictions tend to view the situation in somewhat similar ways. In practice, many, often most, of the files shared on peer-topeer networks are copies of copyrighted popular music and movies. Sharing of these copies among strangers is illegal in most jurisdictions. This has led many observers, including most media companies and some peer-to-peer advocates, to conclude that the networks themselves pose grave threats to the established distribution model.

Whether the threat is real or not, both the RIAA and the MPAA now spend large amounts of money attempting to lobby lawmakers for the creation of new laws, and some copyright owners pay companies to help legally challenge users engaging in illegal snaring of their material.

In spite of the Betamax decision, peer-to-peer networks themselves have been targeted by the representatives of those artists and organizations who license their creative works, including industry trade organizations such as the RIAA and MPAA as a potential threat. The Napster service was shut down by an RIAA lawsuit.

In this case, Napster had been deliberatly marketed as a way to distribute audio files without permission from the copyright owners. In Grokster the U.S. Supreme Court again held illegal the services of Grokster which included allowing users to illegally share copyrighted music.

As actions to defend copyright by media companies expand, the networks have quickly adapted and constantly become both technologically and legally more difficult to dismantle. This has caused the users that are actually breaking the law to become targets, because whilst the underlying technology may be legal, the abuse of it by individuals redistributing content in a copyright infringing way is clearly not.

Anonymous peer-to-peer networks allow for distribution of material - legal or not - with little or no legal accountability across a wide variety of jurisdictions. Many profess that this will lead to greater or easier trading of illegal material and even (as some suggest) facilitate terrorism, and call for its regulation on those grounds.

Others counter that the potential for illegal uses should not prevent the technology from being used for legal purposes, that the presumption of innocence must apply, and that non peerto-peer technologies like e-mail, which also possess anonymizing services, have similar capabilities.

The position in Europe

In the European Union (EU), the 2001 EU Copyright directive, which implemented the 1996 WIPO treaty ("World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty"), prohibits peer-to-peer, claiming it is a violation of the directive.

However, the implementation in national legislation for all European members states has not been completed. Most notably, on December 22, 2005, the French parliament, discussing the law implementing the EU directive, voted at the last minute two amendments legalizing the exchange of copies on the internet for private uses. This decision amounted to a recognition of the legitimacy of peer-to-peer.

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