The video is in Chinese, but it clearly shows a Nexus One accessing a Flash-based P2P web service. The service is informing its visitors that it “may use peer-assisted networking” and asks whether it would be alright to “access your upload bandwidth.” It then joins an RTMFP P2P network, and within seconds launches a video stream. The app is clearly a demo, with a console prominently displaying P2P settings next to the video, and it has since been taken down.

We wanted to know more, so we got in touch with the video’s producer, Jinni Cao. Our biggest question, obviously, was: How did he get ahold of Flash 10.1 for Android? Turns out Cao works for Adobe R&D in China, which makes the whole video even more interesting. Cao told me that the demo used the multicast and NetGroup features of Flash 10.1, which makes it possible to stream video from a single source to a large number of viewers with the help of P2P.

We’ve been pretty excited about the P2P capabilities of Flash 10.1 ever since it was announced late last year, and the demo shows that Adobe takes this feature seriously as well. Of course, you might notice that the downstream in the demo is much bigger than the upstream. This may be due to a bottleneck of the testing environment, or it could be that there was simply no need to contribute more bandwidth to the network. It’s possible, however, that users running Flash P2P video applications like this one over 3G networks could face similar restrictions.

Adobe showed off Flash 10.1 running on a Nexus One in January, and it recently released a video of a Nexus One streaming March Madness via Flash 10.1. The company also assisted SonicSwap with the development of its Tunevision music video jukebox.

Related content on GigaOM Pro: What’s Next for the Cloud? Distributed Architectures (subscription required)

Still, Gnutella hit a nerve. Napster had been sued three months before, and many file sharers were rightfully fearing that the music industry would eventually prevail in court and force Napster to switch off its servers. With Gnutella, no such switch existed, as the client was allowing direct P2P connections without the help of any centralized server. Add to it the fact that Gnutella, unlike Napster, allowed users to swap videos and software as well as MP3s, and you begin to see why many immediately viewed Gnutella as the next step in P2P file sharing.

A step, one should add, that made Frankel’s employer AOL more than a little nervous. It only took the Internet giant a day to force Frankel and his colleagues to take down Gnutella – but even that was too long, as countless sites quickly started to first mirror, then build upon Frankel’s official Gnutella client. There’s always been a little bit of mystery surrounding the exact happenings of those days, but some people have been musing that a person with a surprising amount of insider knowledge showed up in one of the first IRC chat rooms dedicated to Gnutella soon after AOL pulled the plug, only to provide some very detailed information about the inner workings of the client’s P2P protocol.

Speaking of IRC: Early versions of the software didn’t really have any way for users to connect, save for entering another user’s IP address, which is why IRC quickly became an integral part of the early days of Gnutella. It was also in those IRC chat rooms that the myth of Gnutella as a seemingly invincible P2P protocol was born, and the fact that AOL tried but couldn’t contain the software seemed to fit right into that picture. Gnutella was one of the very first P2P apps I ever wrote about, so I lurked in those chat rooms as well, where people were cheering the fact that someone finally found a file sharing solution that couldn’t be shut down. I still remember one IRC user saying: “We’ve started a damn cult again!”

Only Gnutella wasn’t really ready to be a cult. The network routed search requests from peer to peer, leading to an exponential growth of traffic as its network became bigger. Napster programmer Jordan Ritter described the problem early on in a paper titled “Why Gnutella Can’t Scale. No, Really,” and Frankel himself, who has hardly ever gone on the record about Gnutella, once stated that he was fully aware of “how poorly it would scale” when he released the client.

Still, Gnutella captured the imagination of many, one of them being Mark Gorton, founder of the New York-based Lime Group. Gorton was at the time pursuing a vision of automating businesses through structured data, and Gnutella, as something that could, for example, distribute real estate listings wrapped in XML, seemed to fit that image quite nicely. Early versions of the Gnutella client of Gorton’s LimeWire venture were still written with this vision in mind, hoping to build a P2P network that could eventually be used to do all kinds of things with which we’re now familiar on the web, thanks to web services.

LimeWire’s engineers joined a growing group of developers loosely connected through web sites like the long-defunct Gnutella.wego.com (whose admin Gene Kan tragically committed suicide in 2002) and mailing lists like the one for the Gnutella Developer Forum, and one of the first issues to be tackled was scalability. The introduction of a two-tiered system of ordinary clients and so-called Ultrapeers helped grow both the network as a whole and each user’s search horizon. The idea was also later adopted by the developers of KaZaA, whose own take on this two-tiered approach still lives on in Skype’s P2P network.

Technical improvements like these helped Gnutella to grow, but the competition was quick to catch up. Bram Cohen unveiled a first version of BitTorrent only two years after Frankel had published Gnutella, and BitTorrent quickly became the file sharing client of choice for sharing videos online. Part of BitTorrent’s quick rise to fame was its modular simplicity: Cohen had outsourced much of the search and indexing of files to torrent web sites, only handling the actual distribution of data within the client. Gnutella on the other hand was meant to work without any web server. That made it much more invincible, but also much less accessible to users who migrated from apps and clients to a world of web services.

Another issue that has plagued Gnutella from the beginning is not technical, but legal. The protocol was supposed to outsmart trigger-happy lawyers, but the mere fact that there wasn’t a central switch to turn off the Gnutella network didn’t stop rights holders from going after people and companies associated with it. Lawsuits and legal threats forced Morpheus, Xolox, Bearshare and a number of other companies and developers to throw the towel.

LimeWire got sued by the music industry as well in 2006, but that hasn’t stopped the company from continuing with the development and monetization of its client. LimeWire’s client also utilizes BitTorrent these days, but LimeWire’s VP of Product Management Jason Herskowitz told me during a phone conversation that Gnutella has “worked really well” for the company, and that its engineers are looking into ways to make Gnutella once again more attractive to developers by exposing some of its functionality through web services. “There is still a long future ahead for Gnutella,” he predicted.

Not everyone agrees with that outlook. Adam Fisk, who was hired by LimeWire as one of its first developers in the summer of 2000, but left the company in 2004 to eventually start his own P2P venture dubbed Littleshot, believes that some core assumptions of the Gnutella protocol are outdated. “I don’t think that distributed P2P search makes any sense,” he told me, explaining that the very server-less search functionality that made Gnutella superior to Napster also ended up being its biggest burden, and that it would be much easier to have servers handle search and just use P2P to deliver data – a recipe that has already helped BitTorrent succeed.

Sure, LimeWire and some other Gnutella clients could still stick around for a long time, Fisk admitted, but he was skeptical that we would ever see any significant new project based on Gnutella. “That would be shocking,” he said.

Photo courtesy of (CC BY-SA) Flickr user Jessica  Diamond.

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Of course, Avatar has some commercial momentum on its side, given the fact that it’s been the most popular movie ever made — at least when it comes to ticket sales. However, there seems to be another option on the table, according to an unlikely panel of experts. BitTorrent-loving film buffs have been voting with their freeloading feet for weeks, and their choices might surprise even Hollywood insiders. The most-downloaded movie isn’t Avatar or The Hurt Locker, but District 9.

Our friends over at Torrentfreak were so kind to share some of their data about the popularity of Academy Awards-nominated movies on various torrent sites with us, and we would be lying if we said that Avatar isn’t popular with downloaders. Torrentfreak’s Ernesto told us that the site has been keeping track of 4280 torrents for Avatar alone, totaling 11,326,000 downloads in various formats across a number of sites and trackers.

That’s pretty impressive, but not as impressive as District 9, which has seen a total of 12,639,000 downloads. Here’s the complete list of all nominees for Best Picture and their popularity on torrent sites:

So what do you think? Are the pirates right? Will District 9 get the Oscar for Best Picture? Or will it be Avatar? Does The Hurt Locker even stand a chance? Give us your prediction by filling out the poll below:

Picture courtesy of The Pirate Bay.

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Of course, there are also other, slightly less legitimate ways to watch the games online. A number of web sites have been touting for weeks that they’ll carry live streams of the Olympics, and sports fans have been looking to P2P video clients for years to bypass TV pay walls. How easy to use are these services, and how good is the video quality? I decided to find out and give different ways of pirating the Olympics a try.

First, a word to the wise: We don’t recommend to try any of this at home. Not only are you bending the rules, but there’s also a very real risk of catching mal-ware while looking for pirated sports streams. Scammers have been stepping up their game in recent weeks, and countless web sites ask you to fill out surveys or install untrusted ActiveX plug-ins in order to access streams of the games. Please don’t fall for these tricks.

However, users willing and able to avoid these scams can theoretically get access to full coverage of the games online without NBC Olympics. Here’s what I tried, in the name of science:

Live streaming sites

Sites like Justin.tv and Ustream used be be a popular way to catch unauthorized relays of sports broadcasts. However, these days, most of these streams disappear as soon as they go up. Evan Solomon from Justin.tv told me that his company has been working closely with NBC for years on copyright issues, which led to the development of an instant take-down system during the 2008 Olympics.

The site is also using an automated filtering system, and these efforts seem to largely pay off: I was only able to find one live stream carrying a hockey game on Justin.tv, and that stream was so blurry that viewers in the chat room kept asking things like: “Who is winning? I can’t see anything!” Oh, and it also didn’t have any audio. I guess you can fool any filters if you make your feed unrecognizable. However, there were a number of feeds that promised to carry video from the Olympics, only to link to sites asking people to answer bogus questionnaires, and presumably install mal-ware on their PCs. For the record, I didn’t find any working streams on Livestream.com, Ustream or Stickam either.

P2P Streaming

Chinese P2P video streaming clients used to be a sports fan’s best friend, but the many have started to clamp down on unauthorized sports streams as well. I wasn’t able to find any live coverage of the games with TVUNetworks, PPLive or Veetle. But using the Windows-only StreamTorrent client proved to be much more fruitful, making it possible to watch the Women’s Hockey Game between the USA and Finland with around 300kbps without any significant buffering.

The bit rate wasn’t quite enough for a good full-screen experience, but a great way to follow the game while I was working – and I suspect that’s how many people will be using this. I also found a stream of a curling game transmitted with 941kbps, which looked great in full-screen mode on my 15″ laptop screen, but ended up buffering a little too often. It seems like there’s a number of fake sites set up that seem to provide StreamTorrent downloads but instead try to spread mal-ware or get you to buy subscriptions, but P2P sports forums seem to be a good way to avoid the worst pitfalls.

Torrent sites

Speaking of torrents: Sports fans have been busy uploading HD versions of pretty much all major competitions to torrent sites. These videos usually appear soon after the actual competition ends. I obviously wasn’t able to catch any of the action in real time this way, but I did get a nice, crisp HD recording of this week’s snowboarding finals — commercial free, no less.

Web proxies

NBC may skimp on its online coverage, but broadcasters in other countries are going all out with multiple simultaneous live channels, streaming every minute of the games in real time. Most of these sites determine by your IP address whether or not you’re allowed to watch the videos in question. However, there are numerous commercial proxy services that offer to tunnel your connection, in turn masking your country of online origin. I wanted to get access to the live streams provided by the BBC, so I searched for a proxy providing me with a UK IP address, and ended up going with a company that offers unlimited access for $9 a month.

What followed was a little bit of tinkering with the VPN settings of my Macbook, and blimey! I was British. Or rather my public IP address was, and BBC’s Olympics site provided me with the best video experience I got from all the approaches I tried. We’re talking about crisp, full-screen streaming with multiple live channels, accompanied by some nice gents making sarcastic jokes about the weather in Canada. What else can you wish for?

For the record, I also tried to get access to the streams provided by the Olympics website of the European Broadcaster’s Union, but couldn’t get the video player to work, despite being offered full access to all of the site’s static content.

Pirate picture courtesy of Flickr user Juliana Coutinho.

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The decision comes after record labels and other rights holders had threatened Telenor with a lawsuit last spring if the ISP wouldn’t block the Bay’s site. Telenor refused, and the music rights association TONO sued, only to lose in court in November, and eventually file an appeal in December.

The High Court now found that Telenor couldn’t be held liable for the actions of its end users just by offering access to The Pirate Bay. The court also wrote in its decision that issues of complicit liability, as alleged by TONO in this case, may need to be reevaluated when Norwegian politicians take another stab at revamping the country’s copyright laws.

Telenor isn’t the first ISP that found itself under attack for not blocking The Pirate Bay. The music industry successfully forced Danish ISP Tele2 to block the torrent site, and an Italian court just ruled last week that its country’s ISPs have to prevent their customers from accessing The Pirate Bay.

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It’s been three years since we first published a post titled Ten Sites For Free And Legal Torrents. Unfortunately, a few of the sites mentioned in our original post have since folded, but others have come up to replace them, which is why we decided to update our list of legal torrent goodness with new links and additional information.

Mininova used to be one of the biggest torrent directories on the Internet until it was forced to shut down all unauthorized content due to a copyright infringement lawsuit late last year. However, Mininova is still serving access to close to 10,000 legitimate torrents, including HD space mission footage from NASA, documentaries from public broadcasters and user-generated animation shorts. Mininova still clocks about 300,000 downloads per day.

Legaltorrents.com, which will soon rebrand as Clearbits.net, offers access to around a thousand torrents, ranging from indie movies to podcasts to documentaries, as well as a ton of music. Legaltorrents told us that they’re currently facilitating the download of 10-20 Terabytes of content per month. All files are centrally seeded, so your torrent client won’t idle out on you.

Limecast is a podcast directory operated by the makers of Limewire. Users can opt to stream or download clips right within their browser, or access torrent files for episodes of popular podcasts like GeekBrief.TV, Diggnation or the Ricky Gervais Podcast. Not all the feeds seem to be up to date, but the site is still pretty neat.

Legit Torrents is aggregating legally available torrents from various sources, with the content including the NIN concert DVD Another Version of the Truth and the Michael Moore film Slacker Uprising.

The Miro Guide is a content repository for the open source video player Miro, which comes with a built-in BitTorrent client. Some of the content included in the Miro Guide, like TorrentFreak TV, is distributed via BitTorrent, but you’ll still need Miro to download the files.

Public Domain Torrents is a slightly older site with the occasional database error, but that only seems to be fitting for the subject matter. The site features hundreds of torrents for movies with expired copyright. In other words: Pretty old stuff. Or classics, depending on your point of view.

YouTorrent is a search engine that aims to only index authorized content available through various BitTorrent sites, and it claims to currently index more than 80,000 torrents.

Jamendo is a music site offering access to more than 30,000 Creative Commons-licensed albums. All music is available for free via direct download and BitTorrent.

Gameupdates.org features a few thousand torrents specifically tailored towards the gaming community, but we’re not just talking patches and demo relases: The site also offers access to a few hundred trailers, previews  and in some cases even full-featured films promoting games like Grand Theft Auto IV, Guild Wars 2 and Star Wars: The Old Republic.

LinuxTracker finally does what it says: It tracks Linux distributions, making it possible to download all major flavors of Linux as well as quite a few lesser-known distributions.

Image courtesy of Flickr user nrkbeta.

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Remotely controlling your BitTorrent downloads through a browser on your office PC or a mobile device isn’t exactly new; both uTorrent and Vuze have previously offered such functionality or supported access to it through third-party plug-ins. However, the process has been cumbersome in the past, and the new upgrades should help to make this function much more accessible.

Vuze unveiled a functionality called “Vuze remote” earlier this week that makes it possible to pair a Vuze client with any PC or mobile device with a browser without having to know the IP address of the client’s host machine. Users simply enter an access code generated by their client on the site http://remote.vuze.com, and they’re greeted with a web interface that resembles the look and feel of the original client, or a mobile-optimized interface in case they’re accessing the page with a smartphone browser.

Vuze allows users to remotely administer torrent downloads, making it possible to start a download on your home PC from your laptop of mobile phone while on the go. Functionality to remotely access these downloaded files seems to be in the works, but has not yet been included into the current release.

Competing client maker BitTorrent Inc. launched a limited test for a similar, albeit even more ambitions feature a few days ago that goes by the code name of Project Falcon. uTorrent users with access to the Project Falcon beta can control their client through a web application available at http://falcon.utorrent.com that adds another layer of security to remote torrent downloads.

Each session is encrypted with a session key that is being generated on the fly based on a user’s mouse movements, making it impossible for BitTorrent Inc., or anyone else for that matter, to monitor what a user is downloading. BitTorrent VP of Marketing and Product Simon Morris told me yesterday that the architecture of Project Falcon is actually very similar to a remote access service like Webex GoToMeeting, with the content viewed through the web app being completely isolated from the server infrastructure.

Falcon is also eventually going to support direct access to downloaded files through the browser, and uTorrent will even extend streaming functionality to its remote access. This means that users will be able to download a video file to their home machine and then stream it to a machine in their office — a set-up particularly useful in situations where access to P2P protocols or applications is blocked.

BitTorrent Inc. also released a stable version of uTorrent 2.0 this week, which includes the company’s UDP-based uTP protocol. uTP aims to prevent network congestion by automatically slowing down transfers once signs of congestion appear, and previous tests have shown this to work much better than using TCP for BitTorrent transfers.

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TalkTalk’s statement comes after a number of other major U.K. ISPs were found to cooperate with a controversial local law firm that has been forcing thousands of alleged P2P infringers into costly settlemens. These types of pre-lawsuit claims have come under increased criticism in the U.K., with politicians calling them “legal blackmail” and consumer advocates reporting a high number of false positives.

At the core of the current controversy is an anti-piracy campaign fought by London-based law office ACS Law on behalf of a number of software, music and adult movie rights holders. ACS Law has been cooperating with anti-piracy companies to log thousands of IP addresses of users downloading these types of files.

The law firm recently asked a U.K. court to order a number of ISPs to hand over the names of customers associated with those IP addresses. Several ISPs including Be, O2, BT, Plusnet, Enternet and Kingston did not oppose the order, and their customers in question can now expect letters demanding the payment of £500 ($800).

One ISP notably absent from the proceeding was TalkTalk. Torrentfreak asked why, and TalkTalk responded with the commitment to fight such court orders. Apparently that was enough reason for ACS Law to not even try to get customer information from the ISP in the first place. That’s good news for TalkTalk customers, because the U.K.-based consumer advocacy organization Which reported this week that it has received more that 150 letters from customers that got legal threats from ACS Law, despite not having engaged in any P2P piracy.

However, TalkTalk’s announcement may have larger implications beyond the current anti-piracy campaigns. U.K. parliamentarians are currently debating a bill that would force ISPs to disconnect alleged infringers from the Internet after three notices from rights holders — a measure commonly known as “three strikes.”

Current drafts call for U.K. telecom regulator Ofcom to supervise this process. Disconnected users will be able to appeal such a decision, but there will not be any possibility for prior legal recourse. TalkTalk’s renewed commitment to fight such orders shows again that getting three strikes implemented in the U.K. will be anything but easy.

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How much this will impact the bottom line of record companies depends largely on how vigorous they’ll be in pursuing file sharers — and that seems to be very much the idea behind shifting the costs. Lord Clement-Jones put it this way while introducing an amendment to the original Digital Economy bill this week: “We need an incentive for creative copyright owners to make jolly sure that they get their facts right when they start prosecuting subscribers.” In other words: Making the process expensive could help to reduce the amount of questionable infringement notices.

The UK’s Digital Economy Bill is meant to reduce P2P piracy by booting infringers off the Net after a number of warnings issued by rights holders. Details of the bill are still up for debate, with paidContent counting close to 300 proposed amendments.

One issue that has been hotly contested are the costs related to this type of enforcement, which is also known as “three strikes and you’re out.” An executive of BT recently complained that the enforcement would cost ISPs £365 million ($589 million) a year – a number that raised some eyebrows, given the fact that the country’s music industry only claims to lose £200 million a year to piracy.

However, the music industry is disputing those estimates. Trade group BPI published the results of a study it commissioned this week, estimating that the measure will cost ISPs merely £13.85 million during the first year, with costs going down to £3.45 million during the third year. Of course, those estimates were based on the originally proposed idea of ISPs and rights holders splitting the costs 50-50. We’ll have to wait and see whether BPI’s perspective will change now that it might have to cover the majority of these costs.

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Either way, it might be time to do away with these stereotypes and think of piracy as a much more pervasive practice. That’s one of the conclusions of a new report titled “Changing Attitudes & Behaviours in the ‘Non-Internet’ Digital World and their Implications for Intellectual Property” that was just released by the U.K.-based Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property (SABIP). It focused on all the types of piracy that don’t have to do with downloading and file sharing, ranging from bootleg DVDs to shared hard drives. And it turns out that this kind of “sneakernet” piracy is at least as popular as P2P file sharing.

Much of the research available about copyright infringement has been conducted on behalf of organizations or companies with a stake in the debate: The entertainment industry regularly publishes data about economic losses due to file sharing, and companies selling solutions to enforce intellectual property rights have also been busy collecting data to show just how vast the problem is. SABIP doesn’t quite fit into this picture. It’s part of the U.K.’s Patent Office, and aims to help the government with independent research provided by outside consultants who seem to be mostly interested in doing more research. In other words: Don’t expect any easy answers from these guys.

Still, the 84-page study (PDF download) is an interesting read. It sums up various existing studies looking at offline piracy, both from industry and market research as well as academic backgrounds. Here are some of the key findings the authors decided to highlight: Between 9 and 16 percent of U.K. adults buy counterfeit DVDs, and an additional 23 percent join in on watching or simply borrow those disks. In the UK alone, 89.4 million movies and TV shows are distributed via counterfeit DVDs and various forms of home-copying per year. And much like BitTorrent, physical piracy is a gift that keeps on giving: Only 32 percent of DVDs burned at home are copies of original retail disks. Most people just duplicate what someone else copied for them.

The study also highlights some interesting demographic facts about offline piracy: “Offline consumers of counterfeit discs are older, with dependent(s), more likely to belong to lower socio-economic groups –- as compared with the predominantly young, well educated, technologically-savvy demographic who infringe copyright online.” Another reason that drives people to physical disc piracy are babies and toddlers that make it impossible to catch current releases on the big screen. Maybe the key to fight piracy would be better babysitters?

Speaking of fighting piracy: The study finds that there is little rights holders and authorities can do to stop this type of file sharing. Copyright doesn’t seem to be on people’s minds when they buy pirated DVDs or swap movies from hard drive to hard drive. Only 31 percent of people who abstain from offline piracy quote legal reasons as the deciding factor to do so, and most people who do go for a fake copy cite price and availability as the primary reason.

However, that’s not really reflected in most of the research about the subject. Many studies still treat piracy as a willful act. Some consumers decide to break the law, while others stay clean. Truth is, most people don’t even bother thinking about this distinction. “In reality, … legality is just one of a multitude of factors that influence consumption decisions,” the study finds. Add to that what the study calls “confusing market signals,” like the fact that movies get marketed way before they’re available for sale on DVDs, and that DRM seems to punish the people who decide to buy with an added layer of inconvenience, and you got yourself a situation in which offline piracy just seems to be the most logical choice for many consumers.

The authors of the study clearly warn that there hasn’t been enough research done to completely explain why and how people use pirated media. That’s a pity, especially since stricter laws against online file sharing seem to ignore offline trading. From the study: “There is some evidence to suggest that illegal consumers would refrain from downloading if ISPs’ role as a ‘capable guardian’ were to increase, but this is not conclusive, and it may simply shift illegal consumption to the offline arena, where the law is even less enforceable.” In other words: Three strikes against P2P piracy could make sneakernet piracy even more popular.

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