P2P Conference – Trip Report

Ilya Mironov, Crypto group

The conference

• The O’Reilly Peer-to-Peer conferenceFeb. 14-16, 2001, San Francisco

• “The first and most important conference on P2P”

• About 900 attendees, 75 speakers.

RIAA vs P2P?

• Peer-to-peer is larger than file-swapping.

• P2P = Power to the People?

• Where does copyright fit into the picture?

• Fair use for powerful users.

Clay Shirky

Definition of P2P:

An application is P2P if it aggregates resources at the network’s edge.

P2P applications address the nodes outside the DNS.

Clay Shirky

• “Because you could not get an IP address for your PC, you could not really host anything. The veil of second-class connectivity created a second class of users.”

• Balkanization of the address space (ICQ and AIM have created 150 mln cf. to 22 mln in whois)

Clay Shirky

One-liners:

He overestimated by four.

Thomas Watson said in 1943 that

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

We now know that that figure was wrong.

PC is the dark matter of the Internet.

Larry Cheng

• Overview of the P2P landscape

• 150+ companies

• $300 mln in VC funding in 2000

associate with Battery Ventures

Distributed computations ~35% capital

Collaboration/knowledge sharing ~30%

Content distribution (aka Akamai killers) ~10%

Infrastructure/platform for P2P ~10%

File sharing ~10%

Distributed search ~5%

Larry Cheng

• Distributed computing:• $2b/year—the total market for

supercomputing divided between several companies.

• On his watch list:– Applied Meta (LEGION)– Entropia– United Devices

Larry Cheng

• Best funded companies

Groove Networks $60 mln

Entropia $29

Consilent $23

Napster $17+

NextPage $20

OpenCola $15

United Devices $13

Xdegrees $8

Obituary

2000-2001

Bill Joy

• Unveiled another j-word:JXTA

– pipes from one peer to another – ability to group a set of peers together, and

create groups of groups – monitoring and metering– security layer.

• Open source on the Apache license

Patent Expert

• 1980-2000: about 984 patents that mention P2P, with about 200 in claims.

• Patents on P2P date back to the early 80s.

• Probably, most of them are invalid.

Years Patents

1980-84 11

1985-89 21

1990-94 40

1995-99 98

Lawrence Lessig

• Communication Decency ActSupreme Court’s message to lawmakers:

you must wait [before stepping in and messing it up]

• Lawrence Lessig:“We have to wait to see how the things shake

out, before we send lawyers in.”• Napster case is relevant to all innovators

Lawrence Lessig

• The copyright we have nowis not your dad’s copyright.

“What is happening in the digital realm is that fair use is being coded away both through technology and through the licenses…”

(“Alice in Wonderland” e-book—you are not allowed to read this book aloud)

• The copyright law must be changed

Kelly Truelove (Clip2 CEO)

• R&D company on Gnutella

Top 5 concerns

1. Viable business model

2. Security and privacy

3. Legal issues

4. Usability

5. Standards, interoperability

Three most frequent words

1. Peer[-to-peer]

2. Napster

3. Tragedy of the commons

Companies to watch

• I add to my radar:– OpenCola– Clip2– XDegrees– Free Haven– P2P working group

The end

More

• Full version of this talk

Links to companies, research projects and speeches:

crypto.stanford.edu/~mironov/p2p

or

redirect from www.mironov.org