Peer to Peer?

I've asked some of my colleagues here what their thoughts are on P2P and the future of it. Of the people who actually knew what P2P was, and not some sort of bathroom humor, no one really had anything valuable to add. So now that I've been spending some time on this fantastic site I figure you guys would know better than anyone.

So, I'll ask my question.

With this whole Verizon and other ISPs handing over the names of people sharing files do you see the end of P2P and are all the millions of p2p users going to internet jail? If it's not the end what does the future of Kazaa and Morpheus look like? (**Disclaimer** heh, not me of course...I've never downloaded anything . **/Disclaimer**)

You know what I think the future of P2P is, or at least could be. Imagine this, I have a Mod, a video, or some music that I want to distribute on the internet. I am also very poor. I imagine the future of P2P to be a link on my webpage that says ""Download my song!"" and it launches Kaaza, WinMX, or Overnet and begins to download the file based on checksum.

You have two main benefits of this.

1) Guaranteed file integrity, if it''s based on Checksums then you can''t have corrupt downloads, unless you have a virus or something.
2) Free bandwidth. This is the big concern here, for people with no money this is the only way to get your files out there, and you don''t have to submit to control of a fileplanet like entity.

My main concern is scalability, if youre in a niche community, how many people will be sharing your file? This could be addressed though, through social means, getting all your friends to share your file and things like that which are available to people who would be interested in this in the first place, independent artists. Also, P2P networks could improve to handle things like this, if they take this kind of use into account. Now they are designed for wholesale piracy, so more legitimate uses might spur technological innovation.

So IMO the fututre of P2P isnt about ""How long can they exist?"" but ""How long will it take to get people to use it legitimately?"". Theres alot of promise there, and I think itll just be a matter of time before someone figures out how to do it.

I agree with Pyroman on this one, peer to peer could definately be used to reduce bandwidth costs. I also think it will begin to be used in other applications one possible application would be cell phones using a similar system as p2p to communicate even when not close to a base station, simply by having the signal hop from phone to phone similar to the way the Gnutella protocol works.

Very interesting insight, thanks! I never really thought of it surviving much past all of these additional decisions by the court siding with the record industry, etc. However, it seems that there would still be quite a bit of kickback by larger corporations trying to control ownership of content and such.

Have you noticed P2P has become the ""Joke de Jour"" in the media, especially when taking shots at Gen (insert generation letter here).

http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.cfm?uc_full_date=20030122&uc_comic=db&uc_daction=X

and

http://www.ucomics.com/foxtrot/2003/02/04/

Now that''s comedy!!!