[more on P2P]P2P's Promise, and Peril
The O'Reilly Peer to Peer conference, taking place today through Friday in San Francisco, is highlighting some of the key issues surrounding the technology. No one doubts the potential of P2P, but anyone who thinks it's going to flower sufficiently in today's copyright regime is deluded.
The major promise of P2P lies in several simple notions. The first is that we're using only a small part of the value of the devices at the edge of networks. Harnessing their power, from CPU cycles to their ability to create content, will make the Internet universe vastly more valuable for everyone.
In that world, every client -- that is, every PC and other device connected to the Net -- should also be a server. Lots of people are working on this, but a Menlo Park startup called KnowNow has figured out something that just might set off a new Net revolution.
I didn't know this before today, but it turns out that a Web browser can hold open the connection to the server. Normally, a browser sends a request for information, which is delivered by the server. The connection ends.
KnowNow holds the connection open. Then it adds some JavaScript and, voila, you have a mini-server inside the browser. You're not necessarily using lots of bandwidth, but you are pretending, in effect, that you're downloading a very, very long document while the browser keeps communicating with the server.
The application potential here seems almost limitless -- real-time, two-way communications with real sophistication and value. Rohit Khare, KnowNow's company's founder/CEO, and his colleagues are onto something huge, I suspect. (Dave Winer calls it a "mind bomb," not a bad description of a mind-blowing notion.)
KnowNow, which has been funded by the big-time Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers venture capital firm, represents a glimpse of P2P's potential. But hovering in the background of the entire genre is the question of control, and the Napster case is central to a serious threat to a valuable technology.
Here's the problem, as I see it: If Napster, which demonstrably has been used by some (maybe most) of its customers to download and keep music they haven't paid for, represents what the legal folks call contributory and/or vicarious copyright infringement, then why isn't the same going to be true of many of the other P2P technologies we're talking about here?
Why won't Hollywood and the record companies come next after Ray Ozzie and his company, Groove, or someone else doing pathbreaking P2P work? After all, their products can be used to infringe copyright, too.
Clay Shirky, who's done some of the best thinking on all of this, gave an intriguing answer. When enough people do things in a democracy, he said, those things become legal.
Maybe, but not before the entrenched interests cause a great deal of public pain.
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