File sharing and peer to peer networks

Please don't recommend this for inclusion in the edited guide yet, as it is still in development.

The simplest example of this is where your office has 2 computers, and you have them set up so that anyone working on either of them can access any of the files on the other one. You don't have to mess about sending files up to a server, you just access the other machine directly. This technology is called peer to peer networking.

Napster extended this to include a centralised index of the contents of their members hard drives, enabling file sharing between every member. As some of the members had made mp3's out of the contents of their cd collection, the record companies panicked and making the (false) assumption that nobody down loading these were in possesion of original cd's, decided they were loosing revenue, and sued napster to shut it down.

Due to the usefullness of file sharing technology, some of the linux community developed a similar system called gnutella, but with a decentralised index to avoid being sued like napster. The music industry responded by sueing the main gnutella hosts, thus spawning the development of freenet.

Freenet works like gnutella, but with an extra twist. when you start using freenet, you allocate a chunk of your hard disk to it's use. this is then used as an encrypted filestore. When you request something from freenet it asks your filestore if it has a copy. if not, it asks the freenet servers that have supplied you with files in the past to check if they have got a copy. Once a copy has been found, this is sent to the server which asked for it, storing copies along the way. When the cache on the intervening servers get full, the least recently requested file get's removed, repeatedly, until there is enough room to store the file, which is then passed back through the chain to the original requester. At no point does anyone with the servers know what is in their encripted cache, and the act of requesting something from freenet causes it to be massively duplicated throughout the network. This should render them free from prosecution. Whatever happens, peer to peer networking is here to stay, and the record companies will eventually loose. THey should therefore get behind some form of peer to peer networking, and find some model that allows them to make some money out of it.