Peer-to-peer software

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or computer networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or work loads between a certain number of peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application. They are said to form a peer-to-peer network of nodes. Peers make a portion of their resources, such as processing power, disk storage or network bandwidth, directly available to other network participants, without the need for central coordination by servers or stable hosts.    Peers are both suppliers and consumers of resources, in contrast to the traditional client–server model where only servers supply, and clients consume.

The peer-to-peer application structure was popularized by file sharing systems like Napster. The peer-to-peer computing paradigm has inspired new structures and philosophies in other areas of human interaction. In such social contexts, peer-to-peer as a meme refers to the egalitarian social networking that is currently emerging throughout society, enabled by Internet technologies in general.

Source: Wikipedia

There are many advantages to P2P networking.

1- NASA uses this approach by distributing the computation load on various computers spread around the globe.

2- Banks should apply peer-to-peer approaches to protect their clients' assets. For example, this would alleviate the risk of economic collapse when a disaster strikes a major economic center such as Tokyo for example.

3- Information services and agencies depend a lot on this technology, since eliminating one source will not prevent the whole system to continue to provide the information. 

4- In industry automation, the various control points can connect with any other without the need of a central system. This approach is much more streamlined and allows each unit to operate even if any other fails. Again data can be shared and upon failure recovery, any control unit can update its own database. The information can even be double-checked againts those several sources.  

5- A media vendor (music, video or sofware) can sell its own products more easily and downloading time is dramatically reduced. Moreover, direct downloads are not robust and often prone to fail upon network failure even when a glitch is concerned. P2P file sharing with torrents allow to start at one time and to interrupt and continue when the connection resumes. This amount of flexibility makes the process very robust.

File sharing as such is very important and improve communication between people. Millions of people use free P2P file sharing programs - software to swap music, video and other files over the Internet. Everything is normal and legal if people buy the licenses and respect the copyrights.

The actual problem is that the internet allows file sharing of documents which are protected by copyrights. Some countries prefer to ban these softwares based on the pretext that huge amounts of illegal file sharing is occuring. This is like punishing a classroom for the nasty actions of a few persons, This is unfair and will prevent people to benefit from legal file sharing.

Hence, the problem is not one of illegal sofware but one of content protected by copyrights.

I believe that governements should not attack P2P sofware and render them illegal like the USA have just done against Limewire but they should focus on the essential issue: people who sell files without the legal rights to do so.

Luc Rolland