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File Sharers Move
from BitTorrent to eDonkey and Gnutella
Saturday, August 30, 2005
In the never ending game of Whack-a-Mole, recent
action taken against illegal filesharing has
sent the BitTorrent crowd running.....to eDonkey!
It seems that the MPAA has put a lot of pressure
on torrents due to the rampant sharing of their
films on these networks. We have always known
that Hollywood has a "zero tolerance" when it
comes to their content. The MPAA not only goes
after uploaders, they take the care to sue downloaders
that are unlucky to be selected even after downloading
one film! All that has happened so far though
is many people are just fleeing to a network
that they hope is not being monitored as closely.
Cat and mouse game
"History is repeating itself," said Andrew Parker,
CacheLogic's chief technology officer. "File-sharers
moved from Kazaa to BitTorrent and now to eDonkey."
Some high-profile BitTorrent tracker sites have
been closed down: "It's proof that legal pressure
from industry groups results in the mass migration
of file sharers to an alternative network, whether
old or new.
In the US and Canada, there has been a surprising
resurgence of the Gnutella file-sharing network.
It was one of the first P2P services to be targeted
by the record industry but has since faded into
the background.
"People are migrating to Gnutella as the attention
of the record and movie industry is elsewhere,"
said Mr Parker.
"The conduit is irrelevant. People are after
content. This cat and mouse game will continue."
According to CacheLogic, 60% of the traffic
on the internet by the end of 2004 was made
up of peer-to-peer activity, though it does
not have a breakdown of how much of this is
copyrighted material.
eDonkey uses a decentralised network and files
are not stored on a central server. This is
just pure peer to peer filesharing and is harder
to fool with than the old Napster type centralised
servers. We thought BitTorrent was going to
be very difficult as well to control, however
the legal community was able to thwart that
system by pulling the plug on sites that gave
directions to file locations, these were the
so called tracker sites and this hurt the BitTorrent
system when it comes to illegal activity. Now,
they must focus on individuals and this is a
tedious process to say the least. To stay up
to date on file sharing and also legal issues
concerning copyrighted goods in any country,
make sure to stop by our Music Download, Peer
to Peer (P2P) & Legal Issues Forum.
*Article courtesy o f Dan Bell and www.cdfreaks.com
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