Consumers often share intellectual property. Sometimes sharing is facilitated by intermediaries such as libraries, license servers, used-book shops or video rental stores. Sometimes sharing is illicit, such as with pirated software or Napster. Sometimes sellers of intellectual property welcome sharing, as with site licenses or special prices for libraries, and sometimes they discourage it. Inte...

The recorded music industry is essentially a creation of the 20th century, starting soon after the invention of the first recorded sounds. Computer technology and the seemingly free distribution of music through so-called “peer-to-peer” systems such as Napster and its descendents threaten to destroy this industry, or at the very least, disrupt its current revenue model. Proponents of computer f...

Peer-to-peer computing is a term used to describe the current trend toward utilizing the full resources available within a widely distributed network of nodes with increasing computational power. These resources include the exchange of information, processing cycles, cache storage, and disk storage for files. Routing, locating and transmitting of resources, becomes an extremely important issue ...

Since the outbreak of peer-to-peer (P2P) networking with Napster during the late ’90s, P2P applications have multiplied, become sophisticated and emerged as a significant fraction of Internet traffic. At first, P2P traffic was easily recognizable since P2P protocols used specific application TCP or UDP port numbers. However, current P2P applications have the ability to use arbitrary ports to “c...

Since the year 2000, millions of Internet users have been using their powerful home computers by directly connecting and collaborating with each other (Minar and Hedlund, 2001), signifying the start of Peer-to-Peer computing. File sharing solutions like Napster brought P2P computing to the forefront of Internet computing (Kant and Prasant, 2001). However, it also led to illegal copying of copyr...

P EE R-TO-PEER (P2P) C OMPU TING has attracted significant interest in recent years, originally sparked by the release of three influential systems in 1999: the Napster music-sharing system, the Freenet anonymous data store, and the SETI@home volunteerbased scientific computing projects. Napster, for instance, allowed its users to download music directly from each other’s computers via the Inte...

The Internet community has recently been focused on peer-to-peer systems like Napster, Gnutella, and Freenet. The grand vision — a decentralized community of machines pooling their resources to benefit everyone — is compelling for many reasons: scalability, robustness, lack of need for administration, and even anonymity and resistance to censorship. Existing peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have focu...

Im Rahmen des Future Internet – Public Private Partnership Programmes werden webbasierende Technologien und Plattformen entwickelt, welche neue Möglichkeiten für den Datenaustausch in Wertschöpfungsketten durch intelligente Vernetzung von Informationssystemen in Betrieben der Agrarund Ernährungsindustrie eröffnen. Dieser Beitrag gibt einen kurzen Überblick über das Programm und zwei ausgewählte...

The two major concerns about peer-to-peer are anonymity and noncensorship of documents. Music industry has highlighted these questions by forcing Napster to filter out copyright protected MP3 files and taking legal actions against local users by monitoring their stored MP3 files. Our investigation shows that when copyright protected files are filtered out, users stop downloading public music as...