What aside from the obvious technical aspect of the gnutella network prevents the RIAA from shutting down companies like lime and bare share etc...

Because they are doing nothing which is in contravention of law. They are simply participants in a network which facilitates the abilities of private individuals to share and exchange data.

p2p is far larger than is understood by most of the 'popular' client users.
I would suggest you do a google search for only - p2p - The results may surprise you as you will find far more information regarding commercial applications of p2p than any references to the 'popular file sharing clients'.

The system is fascinating, but it is little understood by the majority of today's users.

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Im aware of the magnitude of the p2p movement but the actual product Limewire and the company limewire LLC... As a business I would think that the risk of the RIAA shutting down companies that make software that facilitate the piracy of music, movies etc, is great. I mean the Gnutella protocol will live on of course BUT It is fascinating to me that the RIAA had no problem with napster and others. I would think that its only a matter of time before they start to come after the peers. A 65 year old judge is not going to see the significance of the decentralized nature of GNUtella . Im just wondering how lime,bare morphous and others plan to survive the inevitable onslaught.

*email address removed*

It's because its all open source. Anybody can make any changes to a client that they want. If the company was wasted, then some other group (or the same group under a different name) can continue the effort. Even if a switch was added that could deactivate a client (I believe XoloX tried that, but it didn't work right) somebody would use the open source would be used to remove it and make it public. Simple.

On the other hand, closed source projects that have a death switch or forced upgrades can quite simply be taken out. Judge orders the switch thrown or a forced upgrgade to a useless version and *bam*. Napster's network system was as open as Gnutella (without the changability though), but the closed source app was their demise. The same will most likely be true with KaZaA and it's FastTrack network.

Although not all Gnutella clients are open source, enough of them are to make attacking Gnutella relatively worthless. Though don't think that the RIAA isn't stupid enough to not try it . . .

It seems like the RIAA has its sites set on shutting down internet file sharing. while it may not be possible to 100% shutdown GNUtella I am thinking that they might see shutting down a few of the legitamate companies that make the popular clients like lime as a way to de-popularize it. I mean limewire ,bearshare and Morphous make a pretty penny off of the install base. Bundled Spy/scum ware is becoming a lucrative business model. so given that what we essentialy have is a company that is potentially facilitating the illegal piracy of copyrighted material and profiting from it. I see a huge obstacle in the future of these companies... I mean we as insiders understand that GNUtella is like http and that lime is like IE. but... what about the RIAA just the mention of a big suit could send a smaller company without a warchest scrambling.

Theoretically (under american law) provided the software has a legitimate use then there is no legal justification for shutting it down (even if many or most users use it for illegal activities).

One of Napster's problems was that it had central servers that held details of the files available on the network. These central servers could be (and were) targetted by legal action, thus effectively shutting down the network.

Gnutella is truly peer-to-peer. The client developers are in no way acting illegally in that they do not serve or hold lists of copyright material (Doesn't mean that somebody won't try to sue them - just that they won't have much of a legal leg to stand on).

Any individual user on the gnutella network may find themselves under legal scrutiny if they are sharing files that they do not have the copyright holders permission to distribute. But in a true p2p network (napster wasn't) the loss of one host/client will make little difference to the others.

Mark

but isnt limewire actually very involved in how well the network works and is maintained?

isnt that the point with connecting to router.limewire.com

isnt this and other servers like it set up to properly route traffic? if they didnt exist would the network still work?

Router.limewire.com is only a starting point for joining the network. It holds no file information - just a list of clients that you can start with.

There are many other lists of clients apart from limewire - and the LimeWire software will look for clients it has met before without the need to go to Limewire.

By contrast - Napsters servers actually held lists of the software being distrubuted.

LimeWire are doing work to improve the gnutella network overall - but this is by agreeing standards and optimising the software. On a day to day basis it is only the clients on the network that define the nature of the network.

Without someone like LimeWire pushing to improve the gnutella network, then it won't get significantly better over time - but neither should it get worse.

Losing LimeWire as a developer would be a tragedy - but it wouldn't actually damage the gnutella network in any significant way.

But I can see no legal justification for shutting LimeWire down under American Law (there nearly wasn't any justification for shutting Napster down - Even holding lists of software is not actually illegal - but then - a constitution is just a piece of paper).

Mark

Damn skippy!

I was actualy shocked when Nap went down... They were railroaded by the RIAA and that has limited p2p technology ever since.

But as I am a proponent of lime and the opensource community in general I am just concerned that a majistrate might not see the diffrence betwene hosting a list of puters that have songs (gnutella) and hosting a list of songs and puters (Napster) as the DB key.

What dose Kaza use? is that fast track? if so WHY are they still up and dosent fasttrack use the napster style P2P?

Richard Corsale

Check out this thread which has an interesting discussion about the threat that the RIAA poses for Gnutella and possible defenses that the Gnutella protocol or clients could include.

http://www.gnutellaforums.com/showth...ss+list+search

For information Fastrack and its ups & downs (Old Morpheus, Grockster & KaZaA) try this news story.

http://www.zeropaid.com/news/article.../03052002b.php