August 21, 2000

9:43 AM

Gnutella not really distributed, de facto "servers" more vulnerable to lawsuits
How's that for a grab-ya headline? It's only part of the speculated dangers to Gnutella users postulated by Eytan Apter et al. in this Parc Xerox Department of Information Ecologies paper. Gnutella purports to be a legal alternative to Napster, since it's a distributed, anonymous, peer-to-peer network, as opposed to a central clearinghouse owned by a group of managers. The authors of this paper have measured soem download and usage patterns and conclude that some de facto servers have sprung up by virtue of the fact that most Gnutella users take out more than they put it, many don't make any files available to the network, and the typical user is more likely to download than upload. Those few people who make large collections available to all end up serving practically all the queries. (And, since they already have a big collection, are less likely to download as well.) The authors also conclude that the imbalance of "free-riders" (or, users who download more than the upload) threatens to make the network more sluggish, more vulnerable to crashes.
posted by rschram (6 comments total)

This is straight out of game theory; it's the "prisoner's dilemma". It's always been the problem with the Open Source movement (though there it's not a legal problem) and it's a problem here as well.

Those who leech on the system, downloading but not making collections available themselves, are "defecting" in the terms of the prisoner's dilemma. One solution would be for the people whose systems do provide download to implement a system where anytime someone makes a request, they first checks the requester's system to make sure that there are files there available for download before letting the guy in. In essence, to enforce the fact that EVERYONE has to contribute in order to download. That would require a rewrite of the server code, of course.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 10:31 AM on August 21, 2000

With the benefit of having only skimmed the full paper, it also suggests that a lot of the material available for download isn't all that popular or desirable. In other words, the really good stuff isn't being uploaded. It looks like a hollow-point bullet in the gun of the recording industry.
posted by BoyCaught at 11:12 AM on August 21, 2000

This can easily evilve into a 'barter' system. If you have ten mp3s that the other person wants, you can download ten of his. Policing it would be difficult, but some might be able to turn that into a compromise of sorts. And it would cut down on freeloaders. Ideally people who download on a massive scale would then make what they aquire available somewhere on the 'Net, but that's if this were a perfect idealistic world. Oh well. It was fun while it lasted, but people are still far too human to deserve true utopian freedom on the 'Net. Greed and power won out once again and must be crushed. The days of the wild cyberwest are numbered.

Maybe next millenium.

[oh and yeah that was a typo, but after looking at it I decided to leave it that way.]
posted by ZachsMind at 1:02 PM on August 21, 2000

I still believe that the lack of sharing is more due to the lack of broadband versus freeloading. Ever try to share on 56k? As with everything, broadband helps.
posted by owillis at 2:20 PM on August 21, 2000

[oh and yeah that was a typo, but after looking at it I decided to leave it that way.]

This would be a great signature file. That way you're always covered if you make a mistake. I like it!

[oh and yeah that was a typo, but after looking at it I decided to leave it that way.]
posted by daveadams at 7:20 PM on August 21, 2000

yup, it's a bandwidth problem. no more or less than that.
posted by greyscale at 8:03 AM on August 22, 2000