P2P raises some security concerns for users and accountability concerns for IT. It is still a technology in development where it is hart do distinguish useful form hype and new form old. In the rest of this paper I will evaluate these observations in general as well as for specific P2P systems and applications.

P2P gained visibility with Napster’s support for music sharing on the Web (Napster 2001) and it’s lawsuit with the music companies over digital rights management.

There are several definitions of P2P that is being used by the P2P community. The Intel P2P working group defines it as “ the sharing of computer resources and services by direct exchange between systems” (p2pwg, 2001).

Peer to peer is about sharing: giving to and obtaining form the peer community. A peer gives some resources and obtains other resources in return. I the case

Bearshare (fig 7), is fast, easy-to-use, and very functional. It also includes a "family filter" to protect the user and his/her children from offensive material in their search results. It also has the effect of removing all the spam search results, because they usually contain adult keywords, to attract attention.

With Peer-to-Peer it is making it very hard for all the artist to protect his or her music. CD’s get copyrighted but the very experienced hackers can crack the code and go on copying and sharing it over P2P.

· IP addressing: A P2P network is a transient community. They do not have always-on connectivity to the Internet. In other words, member nodes do not have permanent IP addresses. This calls for a new IP addressing scheme.

It is clear that peer-to-peer file sharing is here to stay. The only question is how the entertainment industry will adapt to this concept and how laws will change or be instituted to accommodate the demand. Some in the industry say that there should be payment by the individual obtaining the files such as a monthly fee or ‘pay per download’.

Gnutella. 2003. Gnutella website. [Online] Available WWW: http://www.gnutella.com

Some topics in this essay:
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