P2P Blog is covering the business, technology and culture of Peer to Peer.
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Why the End of the RIAA Lawsuits Wont Change Anything
The Recording Industry Association of America has decided to end its five-year-long lawsuit campaign against music file sharers, the Wall Street Journal reported today, with the major record labels opting to instead work with ISPs to combat the practice. Some major ISPs have apparently already agreed to take part in a graduated response program: Share once, and youll get a slap on the wrist. Get caught the third time, and your contract gets canceled.
Mathew Ingram over at GigaOM thinks this is a bad idea because it privatizes copyright enforcement, meaning that alleged offenders wont have any clear recourse when theyre wrongly accused. Thats true, and definitely something to be worried about, but its not exactly new. ISPs took on the role of copyright cops a long time ago; for some, the new agreement only formalizes policies that are already in place. And not much changes for the users, either. They can still get sued, despite the agreement. And yet, they will still continue to share music, and a whole lot of video as well. Continue reading on Newteevee.com.
Joost has informed its users via email that it will discontinue the support of its desktop client today and instead completely concentrate on its new web site. This is a big step for a company that once aimed to revolutionize online video with P2P technology, and whose founders previously succeeded with P2P apps like Kazaa and Skype. But its way too early to declare the death of P2P video streaming, as some seem eager to do in light of Joost shifting course.
Not only are others far more successful with P2P video clients, but it looks like Joost may bring back some elements of its software sooner or later. This includes P2P distribution, but also other social and interactive features that made Joosts software unique. Maybe well have to hold off writing the obituaries for both Joost and P2P just a little longer. Continue reading on Newteevee.com.
Vipeers scales back free Bittorrent hosting service
Vipeers has started to enforce some tight restrictions for its free torrent hosting and download service. The service now restricts users to "a handful of http downloads per file", after which the following error message is displayed:
"(W)e're doing what every abused hosting service has to do: detect abuse and block it. Until we have the ultra-fine control dashboard that we aim at, unfortunately we have to be harsher with all our users. That's why we have put some limitations to the number of http downloads."
The restrictions also seem to affect the Bittorrent seeding of files through Vipeers' servers, as users are told that "(t)he file is not relayed in P2P anymore", but the Vipers blog explains that you can always just distribute your file by seeding it yourself. Of course, that was possible all along through other torrent sites.
These restrictions show how tough it can be for hosting and backup providers to strike a balance between being user friendly and not going bankrupt due to exorbitant bandwidth consumption - a lesson that others already have learned the hard way. Nevertheless, Vipeers seems to be willing to go ahead with its service, and the company apparently has some new stuff coming out very soon, so it's definitely worth to keep an eye on them.
Joost has announced that it will discontinue support of its P2P TV application by the end of this week, essentially admitting that distributed content delivery for video streams isnt worth the effort. But if 2008 taught us anything, then its that P2P TV is alive and well in China, at least.
Western services like Joost may have struggled to convince users to share their bandwidth with other video viewers, but Chinese online video fans dont seem to have a problem with P2P TV at all. In fact, Chinese P2P grew so big in 2008 that its putting the audience numbers of Western online TV offerings to shame. Continue reading on Newtevee.com.
"Doug Pasko, principal member of the technical team at Verizon, says that Pandora and Verizon have plans to roll out a P4P implementation soon, possibly by the end of January."
I guess they meant to say Pando, not Pandora. In any case, we might soon have a chance to to see whether P4P is about ISPs embracing P2P or about subverting net neutrality.
It's debatable whether civil liberties really make for good Christmas carols. The EFF has tried anyway, and the result is a non-denominational flash animation highlighting some of the organization's efforts in 2008, featuring, amongst other things, the Switzerland tool aimed at detecting ISP interference with BitTorrent transfers, and, yes, happy dancing babies.
The social file sharing and storage platform Wua.la is releasing a new web UI as well as an API for developers today. Users of the service can now make some or all of their files available on the web where others can view and download them without first installing the Wua.la client.
Users did however still have to run Wua.la in some form or another to access other peoples' files. The new web UI makes it finally possible to send links to your photos or videos stored in Wua.la to anyone without worrying that they won't be able to look at them because they don't know what to do. The web UI also offers access to public Wua.la groups, making it possible to browse files that have been aggregated by various Wua.la users.
It's an interesting move for Wua.la because it will definitely help the service to become more popular, but it's also a step a way from Wua.la's clever distributed storage system. Wua.la utilizes shared hard disk space of its users to save parts of files in the cloud in a redundant fashion, meaning that a file will still be accessible even if some users that provide backup space for it go offline.
The service has always used centralized servers as a secondary backup layer, but the new web UI will certainly put a lot more stress on those servers.
The same is probably true for the API, which will allow developers to integrate Wua.la into their own applications and web services. The API is read-only at this point, meaning that third-party developers will only be able to access contet on Wua.la's network, but not actually add to it.It also looks like the API is restricted to publicly shared files, which probably makes a lot of sense in order to keep private files secure.
Wua.la announced that it is now storing more than 30 million files. It will definitely be interesting to see how these will be utilized in mash-ups. I personally still think one of the most interesting aspects will be a more advanced integration with existing social networks like Facebook.
Breaking news: Bittorrent Inc. not actually worth that much
Techcrunch reported earlier today that Bittorrent Inc. essentially had to renegotiate its latest round of funding under pressure of lead investor DAG Ventures. Techcrunch published a letter of BiTorrent CEO Eric Klinker to shareholders, which in part reads:
"Last spring the Company was focusing its business efforts on content delivery services (DNA), embedded software (SDK) and our direct to consumer portal (the Store). Over the course of the summer it became clear that some of the Companys businesses were not gaining sufficient traction, and that the Company would significantly miss its projections. (...)
Given the changes in our Companys business model and projections that occurred in close proximity to the Series C financing, DAG claimed that the Series C financing should be substantially renegotiated."
What really baffles me about this is that the failure of the Bittorent download store was pretty clear to anyone following the company for quite some time. In fact, then-president Ashwin Navin told me a whole twelve months ago that Bittorrent wasn't competing with Vuze anymore and that the store was at that point merely a demonstration platform for the company's CDN services.
So why did DAG Ventures put 17 million into this project nine months later, only to pull back out after Bittorrent closed its store? There are two possible explanations:
1. Serious communication problems between DAG Ventures and Bittorrent leading to the investors not understanding the company's direction and getting cold feet once it finally became clear.
2. Serious monetization issues with something other than the store, namely the so called DNA CDN services.
I'm not really sure what would be better for Bittorrent at this point. Either one should be a reason for concern, and a possible combination of both could mean that the company could be in far deeper trouble than we have thought.
In 2008, ISPs started to really feel the heat when it comes to video file-sharing. Comcast got reprimanded by the FCC for blocking BitTorrent transfers and consumers rebbelled against P2P throttling. Meanwhile the entertainment industry has been demanding harsher enforcement and HD-swapping users have been eating up more and more bandwidth. In other words: Its been a big mess.
The good news is that the increased pressure from all sides has forced ISPs to come to terms with the reality of file-sharing and other forms of P2P video distribution, which is essentially: You cant stop it, so you might as well find ways to make it run more smoothly on your network. Continue reading on Newteevee.com.
2008 was supposed to be the year when Internet video finally reached the living room, thanks to a whole bunch of set-top boxes. Part of that mix was supposed to be P2P, either in the form of distributed streaming, or good old BitTorrent downloads. Well, guess what: It hasnt really happened at least not on a large scale. Most of us still watch YouTube and Hulu on our laptops, and file-sharing continues to be almost exclusively PC-based.
So whatever happened to all those P2P set-top boxes that were supposed to revolutionize not only how we watch video, but also how those bits reach our living room? With the year coming to a close, we decided to check back, report about progress (and failures) and give an outlook for the fate of these boxes in 2009. Continue reading on Newteevee.com.
