Gaunt Face | Matthew Gaunt

p2p, Illegal Downloading and the Government

I watched a small part of the government discussions about the bill to handle file sharing and I was slightly taken back by the lack of knowledge of p2p (peer-to-peer) networks and how they work (many discussions of blocking websites on a users computer or router), now I’m not going to start with how incorrect this is, but rather discuss how p2p networking could be tackled to only support legal content.

Approach the p2p Networks Directly, as the Root of the Problem

Firstly you need to understand there are different forms of p2p networks:

• Pure p2p: Networks that are truely p2p and communicate with each other directly without the use of a central server
• Central p2p: Servers that are used by users to get information from – normally just to find out files shared by other users and then an ip address to download the file from the user

What needs to be established that attacking these protocols is a bad idea, p2p protocols and networks are perfectly legal, it is the users who share illegal content that are wrong. Putting this aside, you could take the point of view that p2p networks at in the wrong and must be stopped, so how could these be stopped?

Pure p2p networks would be very difficult to stop, the distribution of the program could be prevents but the existing user base could continue with use of the protocol and since there is no server involved, there is no central point of weakness or control. Stop program traffic (discussed later on)?

With central p2p networks, there is a way of preventing  this protocol from working by attacking the service, but the only real threat to not even allowing this to work is torrents, which use trackers for distributing some information but not for sharing the data. But if one tracker is taken down, then use another one. Perhaps stop the distribution of torrent files, but launching a new website is so quick an easy, if you used a service like Amazon EC2 a new website with all the same data could be achieved in minutes (if that), so can the torrent p2p be prevented?

Stopping p2p networks is illogical, they have legitimate uses (i.e. downloading an open source OS) and offers too many advantages for it to be argued that p2p protocols aren’t necessary.

Treat Content as the Issue

This is the sole problem, so how can this content be filtered? The protocol creators wouldn’t treat this as their problem (at least if I developed it I wouldn’t view as my problem unless there was an easy method of implementing it), the users have already shown they will share what they want to share, regardless of the legalities of their actions, so a third party? But who would be the third party and who would pay for it? Well the music and film industry to pay for some companies to find illegal file sharers, so why not move this money into stopping it? Because it’s a mammoth task, filtering all data for legal and illegal content, it would be hard to keep on top of everything, even if they did filter it, the p2p networks would need to be altered to recognise and although only valid files (through the use of certificates of files I imagine). Realistically I can’t see how this would work.

View the Users as the Problem

Can we filter the content from the users side? This is the route the government officials were discussing as the method of choice for preventing illegal file sharing. If you consider the number of levels that you can filter information, you can see that there is alot of options, to me none of which seem like a feasible method:

• IP Level (Router): This to me sees infeasible, how can an IP packet be identified as containing illegal content or not (considering it will contain only a small chunk of a block of a downloaded file). Then if you consider blocking IP packets for an application as a whole, we lose legitimate uses of p2p. But developers can recreate a new application or simple change the data stored in the IP data that identifies the application.
• IP Level (Computer Hardware): Same as above
• OS: Stop installation of programs used for p2p (Same as above, lose of legitimate use, just recreate a new application), and again if there is no way for the OS to detect legal and illegal files, then it can’t be blocked.
• Application: Same problems as all of the above (Will the developer include any of these solutions?)

So all the parties / points of view in p2p network, have a legitimate purpose and each of them have far fetched means for implementing any means of prevention.

Here’s my point of view, there is no technical measure that can be implemented to just prevent illegal use of p2p networks, there needs to an addition to each p2p network. The industries being affected by file sharing are pouring money into finding illegal file sharers and then charging them money for their offence. So why not convert this process into a way of identifying illegal files and make this openly available to developers for use in p2p networks. Then users can opt in to be notified of file they are downloading or seeding which are registered as illegal. You could even extend this to only download files which aren’t registered as illegal. BUT and this is a big but, there needs to be a trusted third party, who won’t be working in favour of the community of users, but for the industries funding them.

Final idea that I can view as even a remote solution, is to set up a trusted p2p network which is maintained to only contain legal content, again requires manual filtering, but can be treated as an entirely separate entity which will need external  funding (ad based perhaps?) but would be working to protect the users from possible legal problems be filtering and only making available legal content, but what happens if there is a wrongly filtered item, should the user be held responsible or the network for wrongly identifying it? What happens if the there is a back log of files that are getting bigger, files never make it through, perhaps make the uploaders personally responsible? But this requires the uploader to have knowledge of copyright infringement to a level that they understand what constitutes an infringement (i.e. if I take a copyrighted image, edit part of it in photoshop and upload it, I could argue I had the copyright if I genuinely thought I did, even though the reality is that I needed permission from the original copyright holder to distribute it). This then raises the broader issue of copyright licenses and the different license such as creative commons.

There is no real solution in my mind than to identify to users, plainly, simply, this is illegal content, download this and we may find out and you may be cut off from the internet, face fines or get a warning. But technical measures from what I’ve seen, seem like a waste of effort, and will only cause more issues than good. I would say there is definately a market for legal p2p networks, there just needs to be funding to pay for the filtering of data. Whether these funding be from the government, industries of revenue of the company is a different matter, but it would seem like an easy alternative to switch users over, but will they use it? Would a web 2.0 spin on it make it feasible, would you download random Series of shows (extended Youtube videos) if you knew they were legal and issue to download and if you would, would someone put more effort into it, building the user base and essentially create a market for such content.

The interesting thing would be if this occurred and people started watching free user created content, would the music industry lose out on more money since people will opt for free legal content even though it may be viewed as inferior.

Its an interesting subject and the outcome will be extremely interesting in it’s reception of the general public, all companies affected by having to create easy ways for users to prevent p2p network use, the affect on p2p networks (reduced user base, stay the same, or increased awareness increases use?) and whether a new market opens up as a result.