P2P File sharing

Hi there,

You’ve obviously came here to find P2P file sharing software.. well, you’ve come to the right spot for once.
Take your pick from the navigation bar in the top of this page, read the reviews, watch the video’s but first let me give you a brief and utter incomplete intro on P2P File sharing.
It all started with:

Napster

Given that it was distributing an illegal product, the original Napster’s key weakness lay in its architecture — the way that the creators designed the method. When the courts decided that Napster was promoting copyright infringement, it was easy for a court order to shut the site down.

The fact that Napster promoted copyright violations did not matter to its users. Most of them have turned to a new file-sharing architecture known as Gnutella. In this editorial, you will learn about the differences between Gnutella & the elderly Napster that permit Gnutella to survive today despite a hostile legal environment.

At its peak, Napster was perhaps the most popular Web-site ever created. In less than a year, it went from zero to 60 million visitors per month. Then it was shutdown by a court order because of copyright violations, and would not relaunch until 2003 as a legal music-download site.
The original Napster became so popular so quickly because it offered a unique product — free music that you could get effortlessly from a giant database. You no longer had to go to the music store to get music. You no longer had to pay for it. You no longer had to worry about cueing up a CD and finding a cassette to record it onto. And every song in the universe was available.

Given that it was distributing an illegal product, the original Napster’s key weakness lay in its architecture — the way that the creators designed the technique. When the courts decided that Napster was promoting copyright infringement, it was very easy for a court order to shut the site down.

Gnutella

Currently, the most popular technique for sharing files is another peer-to-peer network called Gnutella, or the Gnutella network. There’s four main similarities between Gnutella and the elderly Napster:
Users place the files they need to share on their hard disks and make them available to everyone else for downloading in peer-to-peer fashion.
Users run a piece of Gnutella program to connect to the Gnutella network.
There’s also four gigantic differences between Gnutella and the elderly Napster:
There is no central database that knows all of the files available on the Gnutella network. In lieu, all of the machines on the network tell each other about available files using a distributed query approach.
There’s plenty of different client applications available to access the Gnutella network.
Because of both of these features, it would be difficult for a simple court order to shut Gnutella down. The court would must find a way to block all Gnutella network traffic at the ISP and the backbone levels of the Net to stop people from sharing.

There is no law against sharing public domain files. It is when people use Gnutella to distribute copyrighted music & films that its use becomes illegal. This is the problem that got Napster in trouble. The music industry is officially upset about Gnutella, but there is currently no easy way to control it.

So go have your shot at it and try some P2P free file sharing clients from the navigating bar in the top.