From P2P to Web Services and Grids: Peers in a Client/Server World (Computer Communications and Netw

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Similarly, it provides for criminalization of copyright infringement, granting law enforcement the powers to perform criminal investigation, arrests and pursue criminal citations or prosecution of suspects who may have infringed on copyright. More pressingly, being an international treaty, it allows for these provisions—usually administered through public legislation and subject to judiciary oversight—to be pushed through via closed negotiations among members of the executive bodies of the signatories, and once it is ratified, using trade incentives and the like to persuade other nations to adopt its terms without much scope for negotiation.

Peer-to-Peer in itself in nothing particularly new. We can say that an FTP transfer or any other one on one transfer is P2P, like an IRC user sending a DCC file to another, or even email, the only thing that can be illegal is the use one can give to a particular tool. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren't enough criminals, one makes them.

One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. It can also be used to bypass censorship, like for instance the way Michael Moore's film 'Sicko' leaked via P2P or as publicity machine to promote products and ideas or even used as a market annalists tool. However trading copyrighted information without permission is illegal in most countries. You are free to distribute your favorite Linux distribution, videos or pictures you have taken yourself, MP3 files of a local band that gave you permission to post their songs online, maybe even a copy an open source software or book.

The view of legality lies foremost on cultural and moral ground and in a globally networked world there is no fixed line you should avoid crossing, one thing is certain most people don't produce restricted content, most view their creations as giving to the global community, so it's mathematically evident that a minority is "protected" by the restrictions imposed on the use and free flow of ideas, concepts and culture in general.

Sharing contents that you have no right to is not theft. It has never been theft anywhere in the world. Anyone who says it is theft is wrong. Sharing content that you do not own or have the rights to distribute is copyright infringement.

Duplicating a digital good does not reduce the value of the original good, nor does it signify a subtraction of the same from the owner. On the other hand, making that same digital good available to others without a license may have a well understood effect of augmenting the visibility of said product, resulting in free advertisement and discussion about the product, this generally results in the increase of the demand for it, this has been validated in tests done with digital books, music and video releases.

Using the term "piracy" to describe the copyright infringement is a metaphoric heuristic, a public relations stunt from lobbies of big corporations that represent copyright holders or hold the copyright over commercializable cultural goods, as a way to mislead the public and legislators. The legal battles we are now accustomed to hear about, deal mostly on control and to a lesser degree in rights preservation.

Control over the way distribution is archived who gets what in what way results in creating artificial scarcity. This deals with money, as there is added value to controlling and restricting access due to format and limitations in time and space. One other distinction that needs to be made is in content distribution especially one in violation of copyrights and indexing said content. On how it is indexed and to what goals seems to be important, if for nothing else because copyright holders will prefer to persecute services that can pay for infringing on their rights.

But indexing may not constitute an illegal activity at all since no rights are directly affected in some jurisdictions the issue seems to be how open does it promote said infringement and if it constitutes an illegal action by itself, and that can be a point that is extremely hard to make. In any case by most public bittorrent trackers for instance would openly comply with DMCA requests and implement takedown procedures, even if often complaining that requests at times are too broad going so far as to cover works that the requester has no rights over.

WIPO was created in with the stated purpose "to encourage creative activity, [and] to promote the protection of intellectual property throughout the world". In August , the Music industry was rebuffed in Europe on file-sharing identifications, as a court in Offenburg, Germany refused to order ISPs to identify subscribers when asked to by Music Industry who suspected specified accounts were being used for copyright-infringing file-sharing, the refusal was based in the courts understanding that ordering the ISPs to handover the details would be "disproportionate", since the Music Industry representatives had not adequately explained how the actions of the subscribers would constitute "criminally relevant damage" that could be a basis to request access to the data.

This was not an insulate incident in Germany, as also in , Celle chief prosecutor's office used the justification that substantial damage had not been shown to refuse the data request, and does follows the opinion of a European Court of Justice ECJ Advocate-General, Juliane Kokott who had published an advice two weeks earlier, backing this stance, as it states that countries whose law restricted the handing over of identifying data to criminal cases were compliant with EU Directives.

The produced advice was directed to a Spanish case in which a copyright holders' group wanted subscriber details from ISP Telefonica. The ECJ isn't obliged to follow an Advocate-General's advice, but does so in over three-quarters of cases. In most European countries, copyright infringement is only a criminal offense when conducted on a commercial scale.

This distinction is important because public funds are not directed into investigating and persecuting personal and most often private copyright violations with limited economic impact. The FACT is a trade organization in the United Kingdom established to represent the interests of the its members in the film and broadcasting business on copyright and trademark issues.

Established in , FACT works with law enforcement agencies on copyright-infringement issues. FACT has produced several adverts which have appeared at the beginning of videos and DVDs released in the UK, as well as trailers shown before films in cinemas. While operating with the same function that the Motion Picture Association of America MPAA , FACT has avoided public outcry by focusing most o its actions in targeting serious and organized crime involving copyright-infringement.

The MPAA not only participated in the questioning by bringing their own investigators it was allowed to examine the apprehended equipment and managed to find an United States programmer that worked for the site to testify in the legal proceedings. In July in Barcelona, Spain. Since no real illegal content is hosted on servers under the Portugal Telecom control it seems the links aren't a violation on the users terms of use at the identified Blog portal service, and no action has been taken so far.

List of the offending 28 pages available in an article in Portuguese. This is a huge step forward in personal data protection laws but it also will make the work of "pirate-hunters" more dificult.

The World of P2P: Peer-to-Peer (P2P) - Wikibooks, open books for an open world

Universal City Studios, Inc. This decision, predating the widespread use of the Internet applies to most data networks, including peer-to-peer networks, since legal distribution of some files can be performed. These non-infringing uses include sending open source software, creative commons works and works in the public domain. Other jurisdictions tend to view the situation in somewhat similar ways. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him.

The World of P2P: Peer-to-Peer (P2P)

As stated in US Copyright Law , one must be keep in mind the provisions for fair use, licensing, copyright misuses and the statute of limitations. The RIAA and the labels took an aggressive stance as soon as online music file sharing became popular. They won an early victory in by shutting down the seminal music-sharing service Napster. The site was an easy target because Napster physically maintained the computer servers where illegal music files, typically in high-fidelity, compressed, download-friendly MP3 format, were stored.

It focus in advancing the business interests of its members and administers the MPAA film rating system. In the early s, the Association opposed the videocassette recorder VCR on copyright grounds. In a congressional hearing, Valenti decried the "savagery and the ravages of this machine" and compared its effect on the film industry and the American public to the Boston Strangler.

The MPAA acts as a lobbies for stricter legislation in regards to copyright safeguards, protection extensions and sanctions, and actively pursues copyright infringement , including fighting against sharing copyrighted works via peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, legally and in technologically disruptive ways. The MPAA has promoted a variety of publicity campaigns designed to increase public awareness about copyright infringement, including Who Makes Movies? Canada has a levy on blank audio recording media, created on March 19, , by the adoption of the new federal copyright legislation.

Canada introduced this levy regarding the private copying of sound recordings, other states that share a similar copyright regime include most of the G-7 and European Union members. In depth information regarding the levy may be found in the Canadian copyright levy on blank audio recording media FAQ http: With borders and close ties to it neighbor, Canada as historically been less prone to serve corporations interests and has a policy that contrasts in its social aspects with any other country in the American Continent.

The reality is that Canada has been highly influenced and even pressured economically and politically by its strongest neighbor, the USA, to comply with its legal, social and economic evolution. In recent time November the government of Canada has attempted to push for the adoption of a DMCA-modeled copyright law, so as to comply with the WIPO treaties the country signed in in a similar move to the USA, this has resulted in a popular outcry against the legislation and will probably result in it's alteration.

The visibility of this last attempt was due to efforts of Dr. Michael Geist , a law professor at the University of Ottawa considered an expert in copyright and the Internet, that was afraid that law would copy the worst aspects of the U. Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Due the refusal to legislate in accordance with the public needs and wants. By adding extensions of copyrights US, UK and by actively promoting the promulgating laws similar to the DMCA in other countries a monoculture is created where a virtual monopoly on cultural goods is created, generating something of a cultural imperialism.

This reality promotes the population to move its support for transparent distribution systems brightnets to more closed system darknets , that will increasingly depend on social connections to get into, like the hold speakeasy bars that popped up during the prohibition, legislating against the people once more will prove to be a failure. This probably around a centralized entity that should guarantee control and manage the content, maybe even requiring the use of some DRM sheme, an overall failed system.

This types of networks were already tested and failed, since content is also information, the need for privacy or lack of it on an open system will always create generate a more layered system that will ultimately degenerate in a darknet to survive legal actions. In any open society, secrecy, intentional obfuscation of facts and usurpation or suppression of rights should be seen not only as negatively but often as a civilizational back-step.

Often illegal or strictly restricted this types of activities are not only possible by states but also actively pursued by large corporations, that in some nations or standard setting organizations are able to exert an unprecedented control over policy. In a world where the end user intends to have control over their own hardware and software some actions are not intended to see the light of day. A state, a people, a system which suppresses the truth or fears to publish it, deserves to collapse. Some organizations or groups with invested interests still think that it is up to them to think for the masses, in place of just try to push the information out granting the public the ability to make their own informed decisions.

There is an clear organized attempt to, in general, hide facts from the public. Attempting to control access and the flow of information is a fool's errand. People have always rebelled against industry-mandated black box solutions and their artificial restrictions, that do not serve any other purpose but the economic interests of those attempting to exert control. Since P2P and P2P related technologies started to pop up and gather momentum, the security of the user on the OS started to be championed, and placed above user freedoms, by imposing choices that disregards the need to proper educate the users, diminishing their ability to make their own choices.

This philosophy keeps people in a state of being technologically challenged, and afraid of change. It is even funny to see to what degree, efforts are made to keep these "security enhancements" hidden. Well not all is lost, some people can't seem to be made to comply with this state of things and some information can be found and actions reversed.

One of the most important aspects of running an Internet providers ISPs is being quick to adapt to customers' demands and changes in demands and uses. This adaptation can be done from two sides, adapting by modifying the network offering and creating new service offerings or by the suppression and degradation of new consumer trends. The latter is easily done if the ISPs is part of a larger media outlet, that can not only influence public opinion but shape legislation. The simpler solution would be to match their offer to the use, by increasing their capacity and fulfilling at least the contractual obligations, but some decided to simply throttle i.

San Francisco-based branch of the Electronic Frontier Foundation EFF a digital rights group have successfully verified that this type of efforts by Internet providers to disrupt some uses of their services and evidences seem to indicate that it is an increasing trend other as reports have reached the EFF and verified by an investigation by The Associated Press. Some ISPs are now using more sophisticated measures e. This means that even encrypted traffic can be throttled.

However, with ISPs that continue to use simpler, less costly methods to identify and throttle P2P networks, the current countermeasures added to P2P solutions remains extremely effective. Traffic tampering is more worrying than Traffic shaping and harder to be noticed or verified. It like the post office taking the identity of one of your friends and sending mail to you in its name.

When there is a demand offers to satisfy it quickly fallow. One example is the Sandvine Incorporated application that is able to intercept p2p communications and subvert the protocols.

This type of application has dual proposes for the owner perspective , for instance the Sandvine application was primarily designed to change Gnutella network traffic as a path "optimizer". But as today the adoption of the BitTorrent seems to be taking primacy, recent offers of the Sandvine application are capable of intercepting BitTorrent peer-to-tracker communication as to identify peers based on the IP address and port numbers in the peer list returned from the tracker.

When Sandvine later sees connections to peers in the intercepted peer lists, it may according to policy break these connections by sending counterfeit TCP resets. Even if BitTorrent protocol continues to implement countermeasures, they have costs and it turns the problem into an "arms race", the issue is moral or legal in nature, with security implications. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement ACTA is a proposed plurilateral agreement for the purpose of establishing international standards on intellectual property rights enforcement.

The idea to create a plurilateral agreement on counterfeiting was developed by Japan and the United States in Canada, the European Union and Switzerland joined the preliminary talks throughout and It is planned for negotiations to finish in September Negotiating countries have described it as a response "to the increase in global trade of counterfeit goods and pirated copyright protected works.

The scope of ACTA is broad, including counterfeit goods, generic medicines and copyright infringement on the Internet. Because it is in effect a treaty, ACTA would overcome many court precedents defining consumer rights as to "fair use" and would either change or remove limitations on the application of intellectual property laws. After a series of draft text leaks in , and the negotiating parties published the official version of the current draft on 20 April Both the Obama administration and the Bush administration had rejected requests to make the text of ACTA public, with the White House saying that disclosure would cause "damage to the national security.

The Office of the United States Trade Representative's Freedom of Information office stated the request was withheld for being material "properly classified in the interest of national security. Since May discussion papers and other documents relating to the negotiation of ACTA have been uploaded to Wikileaks, and newspaper reports about the secret negotiations swiftly followed. Coverage of the documents by the Toronto Star "sparked widespread opposition as Canadians worry about the prospect of a trade deal that could lead to invasive searches of personal computers and increased surveillance of online activities.

Geist reports that "reports suggest that trade negotiators have been required to sign non-disclosure agreements for fear of word of the treaty's provisions leaking to the public. It is alleged that the negotiations are undertaken under a veil of secrecy. This is not correct. For reasons of efficiency, it is only natural that intergovernmental negotiations dealing with issues that have an economic impact, do not take place in public and that negotiators are bound by a certain level of discretion. This position changed in 10 March with a direct European Parliament resolution criticizing the ACTA, the proceedings and the infringements on fundamental human rights.

Even though the precise terms of ACTA remain undecided, the negotiants' preliminary documents reveal many troubling aspects of the proposed agreement" such as removing "legal safeguards that protect Internet Service Providers from liability for the actions of their subscribers" in effect giving ISPs no option but to comply with privacy invasions. Shaw further says that ACTA would also facilitate privacy violations by trademark and copyright holders against private citizens suspected of infringement activities without any sort of legal due process".

The Free Software Foundation FSF has published "Speak out against ACTA", stating that the ACTA threatens free software by creating a culture "in which the freedom that is required to produce free software is seen as dangerous and threatening rather than creative, innovative, and exciting. ACTA would also require that existing ISP no longer host free software that can access copyrighted media; this would substantially affect many sites that offer free software or host software projects such as SourceForge.

Specifically the FSF argues that ACTA will make it more difficult and expensive to distribute free software via file sharing and P2P technologies like BitTorrent , which are currently used to distribute large amounts of free software. The FSF also argues that ACTA will make it harder for users of free operating systems to play non-free media because DRM protected media would not be legally playable with free software.

On 10 March , the European Parliament adopted a resolution criticizing the ACTA , with in favor of the resolution and 13 against, arguing that "in order to respect fundamental rights, such as the right to freedom of expression and the right to privacy" certain changes in the ACTA content and the process should be made. Nate Anderson with Ars Technica pointed out in his article http: It also allows criminal investigations and invasive searches to be performed against individuals for whom there is no probable cause, and in that regard weakens the presumption of innocence and allows what would in the past have been considered unlawful searches.

Since ACTA is an international treaty, it is an example of policy laundering used to establish and implement legal changes. Policy laundering allows legal provisions—usually administered through public legislation and subject to judiciary oversight—to be pushed through via closed negotiations among members of the executive bodies of the signatories.

Once ratified, companies belonging to non-members may be forced to follow the ACTA requirements since they will fall out of the safe harbor protections. Also, the use of trade incentives and the like to persuade other nations to adopt treaties is a standard approach in international relationships. Additional signatories would have to accept ACTA's terms without much scope for negotiation.

From 16—18 June , a conference was held at the Washington College of Law , attended by "over 90 academics, practitioners and public interest organizations from six continents". They found "that the terms of the publicly released draft of ACTA threaten numerous public interests, including every concern specifically disclaimed by negotiators.

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In September a number of interest groups urged parties to the ACTA negotiations to disclose the language of the evolving agreement. In an open letter the groups argued that: From Wikibooks, open books for an open world. Retrieved from " https: Views Read Edit View history. Policies and guidelines Contact us. In other languages Add links. This page was last edited on 27 May , at By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

Contents 1 What is P2P? Encryption paedophiles and terrorists. EU Proposing to Make P2P Piracy A Criminal Offense "The EP excluded patent rights from the scope of the directive, and decided that criminal sanctions should apply only to infringements deliberately carried out to obtain a commercial advantage. Piracy committed by private users for personal, non-profit purposes is therefore also excluded.

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Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. I became acquainted with Ian when I read his online classes note on P2P and distributed systems several months back. Later, Ian asked me to review his book. This new book is based on those class notes.

The book includes new material and has expanded discussion on several technologies. The Part I functions as an orientation. It talks about what are P2P, web services, and grid computing technologies. It covers the concept, the history, the social impact, and the applications. It also gives in-depth look at several important concerns, e. The chapter on security is well written and clearly explains what are cryptography, hashing, and digital signature. Additionally, the chapter on Freenet clearly explains how Freenet works and organizes content.

The author has effectively used analogy to describe key concepts, "virtual organization", storing and addressing contents, network topology, etc. The Part III includes chapters on several demo applications. Due to my busy schedule, I did not have time to download and build those software applications. This section expands the discussion from chapter 4. As the editor-in-chief of P2P Journal, I have found reading this book was well worth my time. It is concise and clear. The book uses unambiguous language to cover some abstract and difficult to grasp concepts.

It can be a useful book for people who want to understand those technologies, whether as a general purpose or as a handbook. Taylor's book is a good update to Oram's Peer to Peer book from There has been much activity in the subsequent years and Taylor provides a useful summary. JXTA and Jini get an analysis. Perhaps not as successful as Sun might have wished, as least for Jini. More generally, all the major p2p networks are described. With their different topologies.

Napster, of course, gets a mention, as the first major p2p network. Then we see Web Services, about which much has been speculated. And the Grid and Globus, for massive scientific computing. The biggest omission is BitTorrent, which was only getting started when the book was being drafted. But this is now the biggest worry of all the p2p networks, for the movie companies. I feel that this book was a good read and really makes a lot of complex issues simple and easy to understand.

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