The status of P2P in 2004 (in my opinion)

[Bombardier]

The Status of P2P in 2004

Some History As I Remember It

P2P has undergone some significant changes since the "birth" of Napster back in June of 1999. One of those changes was the RIAA deciding that music fans that used Napster were pirates & criminals. Since the RIAA had very deep pockets and one hell of a chip on their shoulder, there really was no contest between Napster and the RIAA. It was a David & Goliath battle where Goliath won. (Or did they?)

Napster was a small company barely surviving and it was easy for the RIAA to sue Napster for millions and eventually get the US courts to shut it down two years later (in 2001).

Napster was the perfect P2P application. Centralized searching though every other client on the network, no fake files, no adware, no spyware, no user lawsuits, small download (1-2mb), and it worked great for dial-up users (which I was at the time).

With Napster gone, it really was the cue ball the scattered the pool balls around (sorry If I got the terminology wrong, I don't play pool). Who knows where all the now former Napster users went? There was an estimated 60 million people that used Napster when it got shut down in 2001.

Audiogalaxy was around in 2001 along with some new P2P networks such as iMesh and Scour exchange. Also in Febuary of 2001, Kazaa launched and it was decentralized. It wasn't owned by Sharman until November of that year. So, P2P went from one main application in 1999 to more than 3 in 2001.

The RIAA was still trying to squash P2P in 2001 and was getting help from US senators such as Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) who kept proposing stupid anti-p2p bills in 2002. Audiogalaxy got sued and shut down in 2002 along with Scour being shut down (sued) in 2001.

Though Kazaa was still around, when Audiogalaxy was shut down, some people really started to miss the "old days" of P2P. Audiogalaxy, like Napster was centralized, music only, rock solid, had a great userbase, good speed on dial-up, no adware in the application itself, and was cool. Audiogalaxy Satellite (the client application) did contain one of the first instances of spyware (installing Gator without anyone's "real" consent. Fine print in one-way EULA's just plain suck).

Somewhere in 2001 I think was when Morpheus latched on to the FastTrack network and became more popular than Kazaa at the time. Sometime in end of 2002, Morpheus was booted off of the FT network and pretty much dissappeared for awhile.

At the start of 2003, there were a lot more than three P2P applications. SongSpy and Morpheus were essentially dead (Songspy was sued to death and hated the RIAA with a passion). Somewhere in 2001 or 2002, IIRC, the RIAA unsucessfully launched the PressPlay and MusicNet "pay" music services which ended up being a big joke to people who were using Kazaa and other P2P networks.

In June of 2003, the RIAA was really "hot under the collar" and started filing individual lawsuits against P2P users. Something that had been talked about for a long time, but never happened for two years after the fall of Napster.

In 2003, Apple also launched the iTunes music store and the Napster brand came back declawed as a pay subscription service. More than 1000 people were sued by the RIAA in 2003. A lot were college students and some were juveniles (12 yr old girl) or elderly (65+ yr old grandma). Many college students settled with the RIAA out of court, but many remain nameless to this day.

-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Out of 1100+ lawsuits the RIAA has filed how is it that only 500 or so have been reported as to have settled? Are the other 600+ actually going to take the RIAA to court to defend themselves from their accusation? Who knows.

It is now March of 2004. There are over 50 P2P applications. There are over three online music stores. iTunes have sold over 50 million 99cent songs to people. The RIAA has pocketed most of the profit, still leaving artists out in the cold. The lawsuits keep coming from the RIAA with no end in sight.

Even in the UK, there is threat of lawsuits over P2P. Sharman Networks had their offices raided by Australian police most likely influenced by the Australian recording industry.

P2P has gone though so many changes over the past five years, but I don't think it ultimately was for the better. That's the core of this post. I feel the status of P2P today in 2004 is worse than it was in 1999 and 2000.

Sure, there's multi-sourcing in P2P applications. That helps give people the download speed that Napster could never deliver. A lot of Napster users were on dial-up, except for the college users. Broadband wasn't as widely used in 1999 as it today in 2004.

The statistic of there being "60 million" P2P users in the US has been thrown around for a few years. My question is: Where is everyone? Where are the Napster users of 1999? The ones who continue to use P2P are divided up amoungst all the other P2P applicatons that exist today. The "centralized" userbase is fragmented.

P2P application quality has really diminshed in the last year or so. Yesterday I installed the following "latest versions" of P2P applications on my Windows 2000 machine: Grokster, Kazaa Lite Resurection, Warez P2P, iMesh, Overnet 0.52, WinMX, and Soulseek 154 test3

After installing the applications, I quickly fired up Ad-Aware and found, count this, 240 recognized pieces of spyware on my machine. Some couldn't even be removed without a reboot and ad-ware being run exclusively. I ran Spybot Search & Destroy and ran across other spyware that Ad-Aware missed.

Once all the spyware was run, I fired up (or tried to fire up) each P2P application to search for music by R&B group All-4-One. Well, Grokster complained about missing some "core" components and would not run. Meaning, that if you remove the spyware, you cannot use the app. Grokster used to be mildly cool and now it's a total piece of crap. So much for search results. lol :rolleyes:

Kazaa Lite Resurrection was another spinoff of Kazaa Media Desktop, similar to Kazaa-Lite. I won't use Kazaa Media Desktop due to adware, Altnet, and poor funcationality (ie. no "search more", KL speedup,...etc). After a lot of "no results found" on Kazaa I finally found a few sources for some songs I was looking for. And what do you know... When I tried to download them, all I got was "More Sources Needed" or "Remotely Queued" messages. I could not download even one song from Kazaa.

Back in 2001 when I used Kazaa and Morpheus, I could download all I needed with ease! I hardly ever got a "remotely queued" or "more sources needed" message then.

The network claims to have over 2.5 million users connected simultaneously sharing over 300 million data files of some sort. They must not be music! I run a broadband router and set up port forwarding correctly and configured Kazaa to use my open TCP port, but it did not improve the download any.

I was skeptical about the Warez P2P client from the beginning and my skepticism proved right. The application was more than useless and produced undue harddrive activity on my PC when it was running. Not even one search result in 5+ minutes of searching.

I never found much use in iMesh and I guess I never will. I did not get very good search results from that service.

I like Overnet, it has some good content, but it's not music. Sure it has music, but not too much of it. A few main problems I have with it (and eDonkey/eMule/BT type networks) is the forced sharing, the fact that it kills my router (UDP packet flood), and long queues.

I do not believe P2P applications should force people to share content. Sure it builds the network content and no one wants a network full of "leechers", but freedom of choice has to exist somewhere. Overnet/eMule/..etc work on a "ratio" system. That is one thing I hated about private music ftps (pre-Napster days) and one reason I didn't use them. Overnet is hell on dial-up users bandwidth as well.

WinMX can be good, but I never found much use in it. The queues on WinMX at times rival those on eDonkey. The search results are usually poor on WinMX as well (at least for me they are).

I like Soulseek. I have explained my beef with Soulseek in a different thread. I wouldn't call Soulseek the "perfect" P2P application, as the search results are more about quality than quantity. Long queues can (and often do) exist. Soulseek is one of the closest things I've seen to the old Napster of 1999.

The RIAA Strikes Back

With the lawsuits aimed at Kazaa users within the last year, the network has really taken a hit. A lot of people have jumped ship and the once mighty Kazaa has turned to crap. If you live in the US, you cannot share music on Kazza for fear of litigation. Right or wrong, I cannot afford to fight the RIAA in court, so I will do my best not to get sued.

Of all the times I said I liked the "new" Morpheus P2P application, I didn't really mean it. I was only saying that out of sympathy. When it comes down to it, Morpheus really sucks now. The spyware it installs on your machine is inexcusable and the program has adware too. I could tolerate the program if it actually produced good, helpful search results. But no, it doesn't. Just look at the networks it's running. It leeches off of FastTrack, it connects to eDonkey (ugh), and Gnutella (ugh!). No, Morpheus is no good.

I feel that P2P is still up for the taking for any company that want to lure the rest of the people away. iTunes had success last year and continues to sell millons of songs. They sold over 50 million songs so far. That's millions of people who aren't using P2P services to get their music (who may have been at one time).

As Peter Gabriel said, "You have to offer them something that's better than free". I'm not saying iTunes or any other pay service is perfect. They're not. They still have low to mid quality DRMed audio files with a limited selection of songs.

iTunes has no spyware however. One of the biggest faults I blame P2P companies with today are the adware and spyware that are bundled with their apps. Some of the spyware that was installed on my machine yesterday (240 pieces), was pretty ugly stuff. Spyware can steal personal information and send it unknown sources.

My prediction is that spyware will help bring the downfall of P2P. Just wait until someone blabs on the major news media about how much "information stealing" spyware is in P2P "websites" (lol. It's a phrase that the news loves to use, they really should be saying applications).

People will start running scared and really stay away from P2P. The masses are largely uneducated about P2P and computers in general. They fear what they don't understand.

All P2P companies care about these days is making money. Morpheus and Sharman Networks don't care about their userbase's privacy despite what they say publically As long as they can make lots of cold hard $ on spyware/adware, then they will continue the network.

Napster had no spyware and adware, yet it managed to pay it's bills just fine. Napster didn't go out of business because it couldn't pay its server bandwidth!

It was all about the community, discovering new artists, and the music then. It was about the quality of the application.

They very money companies are making through spyware & adware could turn people off from P2P if something better was placed in front of them. It's basic laws of marketing. Consumers are lazy and will use what's the easiest to use.

P2P still stuffers from slow download speed, poor quality files, and fake files. Not to mention the chance to be sued for many thousand dollars. iTunes could capitalize on those facts.

Back to my original question? Where are the 60+ million file sharers in the US? In the world?

Based on my poor search results and music downloading from a few of the "top" P2P applications that exist today, I'd say they were all out to lunch. The RIAA will never stop their continued crackdown on P2P and the mafia-style lawsuits have got some people spooked into not using P2P.

I'll stick to using P2P for now because it's free.

I still don't feel that the pay services offer enough to make me open my wallet. Once audio quality picks up to the sound of a "braindamaged .mpc file (~270k VBR), and there are 0 file transfer & burning restrictions, and the price is really competitive (allofmp3-type pricing, 83 cents or so an album) then I'll consider paying.

[Malicious Intent]

As an Ares fanboy it pains me to read that a) you used warez p2p and B) [ok, what idiot made "b" followed by ")" a smiley?] you didn't like the network.

You can do plenty to help ease the effects of packet flooding with programs that force sharing. How long does it take to limit your upload? BT has ushered in a whole new era of p2p, far superior to even the times on kazaa before lawsuits.

As for getting singles, I've never had a problem. Perhaps that is my taste in popular music, rather than some more obscure bands. On the universities connection, I download music from Ares faster than I can play it. That is all I ask.

I havn't been around since the start of p2p. I missed out on Napster and Audiogalaxy and Kazaa in "the good old days". Now I get everything I want from p2p and I get it quickly. If you think it is bad now, then you must have been serverly spoilt in the past. I'm on dail-up right now. I can't believe that anyone would look back fondly at using this crap.

Finally, does it matter where those users have gone? More users does not just mean more people to download from, but also extra competiton for those sources. Ares had 25,000 users when i joined. It has just been annouced that it has broken the 300,000 barrier. Great. That is an extra god knows how many crap files from kazaa. It will also attract the attention of the RIAA et al. It is more people to fight with over the release of a new album.

[Kooperman]

As to the numbers of users of p2p, there should be a steady coming and going of old users and newcomers. After you've been using p2p for years, there's bound to be a point of satiation when you look at all the songs and albums and realize you'll probably never be able to listen to all that you already have. To continue to participate at the same rate would probably smack of addiction to the process moreso than hunger for more music. But for every person who cuts back on their sharing, new sharers will be coming in to take up their slack, bringing in fresh music they already own. It's a cycle that has been successful in bringing to the forefront many more hard-to-find songs and albums than were previously available.

[DudeAsInCool]

Since this was written as his own personal experience, I think the article will either open up other people's minds to look back at their own experiences, and also help Mr. B. get some good input on strengthening his.

I think P2P applications are improving, and users are growing around the world. Its the commercial aspects of P2P that have been lacking... Napster seemed to me to have a lot of good attributes, and I think Bit Torrent has a lot of nice applications, too. But that's just a view from afar... Mac limitations have not provided me a complete overview...

I use Limewire once in a while. But frankly, I need an upgrade on my computer and a burner, and I really havent had the time to rebuild my collection, and be able to adequately share. When I do, I will use private rooms..

[Ken]

Nobody wants to come out and say it, but the main change in the past few years has been........................(yes, it was mentioned, but it's the most SIGNIFICANT)

The switch from futile lawsuits against P2P companies, to the USERS.

We can try and deny it, but MANY people (mainly U.S. residents) have been scared away from P2P (I KNOW of many, and am technically included in that list).

I don't share music and movies on public networks anymore (And I don't download said movies and music from the ED2k network, as you share the partials). I share anime, and I upload to newsgroups every once and a while, but the "good old days" of the conventional P2P network (sharing on fasttrack, Gnutella, etc..) are done with for me.

For my downloading needs, it's BT (Anime only), Newsgroups, and IRC.

[jipper]

how come ES5 wasnt mention, it gives 100% safety from the RIAA...honest..

[Bombardier]

how come ES5 wasnt mention, it gives 100% safety from the RIAA...honest..

I think this sums up my feelings about ESV.

http://www.zeropaid.com/news/articles/auto/02412004a.php

:shootin: :shootin: :shootin:

[Shawn]

Morpheus was kicked off of fattrack in the spring of 2002, I think you wrote the end.

Good to see your opinions though. :good job:

[Wolfie]

I think this sums up my feelings about ESV.

http://www.zeropaid.com/news/articles/auto/02412004a.php

:shootin: :shootin: :shootin:

Ditto. :D