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.
|
"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.
Source: BBC
