Don't kill p2p because of a few bad eggs Peer-to-peer networks can be used for legal or illegal purposes. So can the telephone, a newspaper or a church's bulletin board. People are responsible for their own actions and there are laws designed to prosecute people for illegal actions.
The legal uses of P2P are rarely heard, because they are not 'sexy' or political. P2P allows artists and listeners to connect directly. The proliferation of unique works created and distributed on the Internet is staggering.(not the best letter to the editor, but the best I could find)

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Ok, so in theory, p2p apps can be used for purposes other than downloading coprighted music and porn. But seriously, does anyone actually use it for legitimate purposes? What do you search for on Kazaa/Gnutella/BitTorrent that is useful, legal, and interesting?
posted by mecran01 on Sep 16, 2003 - 42 comments

Clip2 are closing their doors. They provided usage statistics for Gnutella, OpenNap, and JXTA, helped firm up the Gnutella protocol, and created the Clip2 Reflector which provides a proxy and index service for the Gnutella network - which doesn't work anymore, as I found out when I tried to use Gnucleus and it didn't find any hosts. Did they just run out of money, or did something more sinister happen? (I'm betting they just ran out of money.) Are any other organizations going to step up and take over the services they provided? Um... and how do I make Gnucleus work again?
posted by RylandDotNet on Sep 5, 2001 - 3 comments

Gnutella -- DeCSS Redux? Anyone catch the Salon article on gnutella? Speculation by Cary Sherman, general counsel of the RIAA, on how to bring gnutella down includes the following:
"...There are also people disseminating the program, and people who are using it to disseminate materials. There could be legal strategies to address that."
Once again people merely "disseminating" an otherwise legal program are -- the phase I believe is -- actionable.
posted by leo on Sep 30, 2000 - 8 comments

Is it still "file sharing" if you don't share? According to a Xerox Parc study, 70% of Gnutella users are downloading music, but they aren't sharing with others. Some Gnutella developers say this is a self-correcting problem and that new users will step up to fill the gap. Others think this is the start of a growing trend and the whole copyright infringement issue might go away if the greed of users in a peer-to-peer network prevents it from succeeding in the first place.
posted by honkzilla on Aug 24, 2000 - 8 comments

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 on Aug 21, 2000 - 6 comments

So called Gnutella-worm.... So, I'm sure one or two of you have seen press coverage of the supposed spread of a set of vbs-worms, through the Gnutella community (Napster without a centralized server for those who don't know what it is). I have to agree with the Gnutella-folks statement, that this is more an exploit of windows and user-foolishness, than anything technically skilled. What's interesting to note is that it seems to be having a chilling effect...usually there's somewhere around 5,000 hosts, and 10 Terabytes of data online...today, there's barely 1100 hosts. I would have thought the average gnut-er was smarter than to fall for a vbs-worm.
posted by nomisxid on Jun 5, 2000 - 1 comment

The warez, mp3-traders, hacker and terrorist industry just got a just got a boost in the arm. the goverment and all the music companies are going to see that the internet is not to be regulated. You cannot stop individuals from sharing files between themselves and everytime you start to ban one program another one more innovative than the last pops up. I am going to stop my little rant here because I don't want to seem like i am anti goverment ...viva la revolution.
posted by neo452 on Apr 10, 2000 - 0 comments