P2P Service, Is It a Poison or a Medicine?

‘Is it a poison or a medicine?’

Waves are getting higher in the P2P service industry due to the court order to stop the service of the MP3 music file-sharing site ‘Soribada.’

The Soribada is in jeopardy due to the court order now that the webmasters Yang, Il-Hwan(31) and Jung-Hwan(27) brothers are prosecuted in the charge of copyright law violation aiding and abetting.

Therefore, the debate around P2P services including the Soribada gets heated.

The record industry expects that the local record market will be activated because of the court’s decision. On the other hand, the IT industry worries about the withering of the related IT industry of MP3 players and P2P services.

And some web-users are resisting against the decision citing the “copyleft” movement, which objects to the pay Internet contents service. We inspect the P2P services that are increasing despite of the Internet copyright violation debate.

▽P2P is increasing=The agony of the music industry is that there are many P2P services that substitute the Soribada even though it disappears.

There are some thousand P2P programs are being used worldwide. There are around ten programs developed in Korea as well.

The foreign program the ‘eDonky’ as so many users that there is vast number of sharable materials such as MP3, images, and programs. The use of Korean users is also increased recently, so there is increasing number of servers that serve Korean MP3 files only. When downloading, users do not need to go through a server, but transfer files directly with another user, so the file transfer is very stable. A user can manage a server himself by downloading a server program.

The ‘Guruguru,’ which started its service last October, is a pay service (3,000 won a month); however, it is popular enough that the membership is exceeding a million already. The eDonkey can search files of all the users online, but the Guruguru can only transfer files of a particular user only. If you use 2 ID’s, you can connect to home or office computer and remote control them such as transferring files.

The ‘Nutela’ is a P2P service that does not use servers at all and is building a network with only the users personal computers to avoid any copyright problems like the Soribada or the Napster. The ‘Freenet,’ which guarantees anonymity by hiding IP and coding documents, is being noticed as an alternative of the ‘Soribada.’

▽An alternative of Internet, P2P=P2P is a revolutionary way of Internet use because the PC’s online can transfer files without going through the central servers.

We can create a performance of a super computer it we connect tens of thousand PC at home together; therefore, P2P is spotlighted as a new generation Internet use.

The ‘SETI@home’ project of the University of California in America is a typical example. This project developed by the SETI team of the University of California, Berkeley is using thousands of computers, which is just consuming electricity at homes, to analyze the information to search for life forms in outer space. The SETI team recruits volunteers though its home site at setiathome.ssl.Berkeley.edu and analyzes the survey information only during the volunteers’ computers are at rest, so the team can process as much information as a super computer can handle in a thousand year in a single day.

Other than the ‘SETI@home,’ similar projects are being performed worldwide such as development of AIDS treatment, climate research, financial analysis, and bio-life science field.

The president of a P2P service the Graetech, Bae, In-Sik pointed out, “The reason why the P2P technology is considered as a tool for illegal copies is because of the gap between the fast development of technology and the reality of the industry that can not catch up the development speed.”

Tae-Han Kim Chang-Won Kim freewill@donga.com changkim@donga.com