History of peer-to-peer file sharing. Technology to prevent it, and the future of it.

Essay by BocephusUniversity, Bachelor'sA+, April 2002

download word file, 4 pages 4.3 3 reviews

Peer-To-Peer File Sharing

The rise and fall of Napster in the late 90's brought file sharing over the Internet, and peer-to-peer technology, to the attention of the world. Napster's demise led to the creation of companies such as KaZaA, Morpheus, and Audio Galaxy, whom all learned a valuable lesson from Napster. Avoid copyright infringement and elude record companies. So far they have been pretty successful, but record companies are getting closer and closer to putting these new companies out of business. Record companies are looking to software companies to beat these file sharing organizations at their own game, creating software that would elude the copyright laws but contrary to downloading copied files, they seek to eliminate sharing.

One reason the growth of peer-to-peer file sharing has happened is possibly for one reason alone, the constant expansion of the capabilities of the ordinary PC computer. Top of the line PC's have the capabilities of a supercomputer ten years ago.

The dramatic growth of local storage resources allows PC users to store data in multigigabyte storage facilities, something unthinkable only a few years ago. Also the expansion of network bandwidth and the increased mobility of computing resources have provided the hardware capabilities required to send these files via peer-to-peer. This expansion of hardware meant people and their devices could connect to the Internet anywhere they want, and connect at blistering speeds. After all this hardware was in place it was just a matter of creating the vision of peer-to-peer connections and the software to implement it. This is where Napster made its fame. Napster focused its attention on sharing music over the Internet, not publicly, but in end-to-end connections between two personal computers. Record companies and recording artists were soon filing suit against Napster for infringing their copyrights. After months of litigation...