If Microsoft’s freshly granted patent for a digital rights management system sounds like a 2003 idea coming to fruition in 2009, that’s because it is — the patent that was granted yesterday was filed six years ago. The newly codified bit of intellectual property is a DRM system that’s distributed over peer-to-peer networks, decentralizing a processing mechanism that traditionally resides on a central server. The entertainment industry has used DRM to prevent unauthorized duplication of copyrighted material, but it’s been largely abandoned by the music business in response to customer demand for unprotected files.

Information Week’s Alexander Wolfe makes a case that content owners could still use DRM in legitimate P2P music-swapping networks at some point in the future, “when peer-to-peer networks reemerge from their current sub-rosa position and become popular, brand, public-facing methods of distributing content,” enabling Microsoft to reap considerable royalties. Indeed, P2P technology has a place in above-board distribution as it partially powers everything from streaming music service Spotify to several video distributors, so Wolfe is onto something. But if the idea is that the old paradigm will be flipped — you can do what you want with the file you pay for, but you can’t duplicate the free file you find on P2P networks, instead of the other way around — I have my doubts that these “public-facing methods of distributing content” will ever dominate if they’re full of DRM.

Wolfe asserts that “the whole ‘Web wants to be free’ versus ‘evil corporations with their DRM’ argument…hasn’t been resolved,” despite evidence that 95 percent of digital music acquired by consumers today is pirated (and presumably virtually all DRM-free). Apple has dropped DRM from its market-leading music store after consumers resisted DRM to the point that the music industry finally gave up. Copy protection is eroding as people flock to unprotected alternatives, and most DRM has turned out to be breakable anyway. It’s hard to imagine where this patent will fit in — unless the past six years have simply obviated it, and Redmond isn’t planning to do anything at all with it anymore.

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Posted by Paul Bonanos on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  3 Comments
Tags: DRM, Microsoft, P2P

The Internet is close to a meltdown, according to The Register. The culprit, according to author Richard Bennett, is the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent, which introduced a new type of file transfer with its most recent alpha version. BitTorrent clients have long been using the TCP protocol to facilitate file transfers, but now uTorrent is moving to UDP, a protocol that is very popular for streaming media, VoIP and other real-time transfers. This will essentially lead to torrents eating up all of the bandwidth available for VoIP, according to Bennett, who calls uTorrent’s UDP transfers a “net-killing feature.”

Of course, the same argument was made when UDP-based VoIP connections and video streams became popular — and the Internet hasn’t ceased to exist. The truth is that uTorrent’s UDP implementation could actually be a step toward alleviating congestion problems. Bennett, however, decided to ignore this and instead serve up nothing more than a thinly veiled rant against net neutrality.

Bennett’s piece is based on a belief that UDP traffic is “aggressive” and uncontrollable, whereas TCP is the nice and proper protocol that can be easily managed. This notion ignores the basic fact that P2P developers, in order to make the protocol work at all, need to implement TCP-like functionalities on top of UDP, one of which includes congestion control. You simply can’t operate a P2P client that eats up all of its users’ bandwidth, much less build a successful business model on top of it.

BitTorrent Inc. has been working on establishing itself as a CDN solutions provider, offering media companies the ability to tap into its vast user base to deliver video and other huge files. Of course, this only works if end users are actually willing to provide some part of their upload bandwidth, and they are only willing to do so if file transfers don’t stop them from doing other things, like playing online games or making VoIP calls.

BitTorrent has traditionally entrusted its users with figuring out how to balance their network load, meaning that users had to manually limit their client’s maximum upload and download rate in case they encountered choppy Skype connections or similar problems.

uTorrent’s new implementation wants to automate this process by regulating its UDP traffic in relationship to ongoing TCP transfers. The company has tested its congestion control in recent months, and the first results seem encouraging, as a quote from a report (PDF) that the company recently shared with the IETF reveals:

“In one example, (BitTorrent) was used to download and seed game updates while an online multiplayer game was being played. With TCP used for transport the way it is usually used in BitTorrent, ping times shot up to 2000 milliseconds and beyond and stayed there while seeding. With the novel congestion control, ping times were in the 50-100 millisecond range, while the upload rate remained essentially unchanged.”

For now, we do have to take the company’s word for it that this actually works. uTorrent is not open source, and the client’s UDP file transfer protocol hasn’t been publicly specified, either. BitTorrent Inc. V-P Simon Morris has declared in a public response to the Register article that his company is working with the IETF to find “solutions that can be standardized and broadly adopted in due course.” In fact, BitTorrent engineer Stanislav Shalunov is co-chairing an IETF working group for this very purpose.

So why did Bennett chose to ignore all of this? Because a little scaremongering can go a long way to make the case for an ISP-based network management clampdown on P2P traffic. The only way to prevent the coming Internet meltdown, he contends, is to filter out uTorrent’s UDP transfers on the ISP level, and the only way to get this done is do away with net neutrality. Right — because if there’s one thing that we’ve learned from the financial sector, it’s that meltdowns are best prevented by doing away with regulation.

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Posted by Janko Roettgers on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  30 Comments
Tags: BitTorrent, P2P, utorrent

Chinese P2P solutions provider Vatata, whose similarly named P2P streaming platform Vakaka we wrote about last year, has developed a set-top box solution to bring a Joost-like P2P TV experience to the living room. It provides access to both the company’s own P2P network for live streaming video as well as public P2P networks and protocols such as Emule, Gnutella and BitTorrent for media downloads. Continue Reading.

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Posted by Edit Staff on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  0 Comments
Tags: P2P, set-top box, vatata

You just had to squeeze a little more work in on this Fourth of July holiday, didn’t you? Well, we’re glad you stopped by. But before your fire up the BBQ, take a minute to catch up on what you might have missed over at NewTeeVee.

A federal judge ordered YouTube to hand over its user data to Viacom. If it stands (the Electronic Frontier Foundation says the judge’s order violates federal law), that means Viacom will know all about your secret obsession with making Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend” the most-watched video of all time.

Two big-name Hollywood types (and fanboy faves), Seth MacFarlane and Joss Whedon, are experimenting with new content models online. MacFarlane (“Family Guy”) will create “Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy,” an animated series with a multimillion-dollar budget that will be distributed by Google AdSense to targeted sites. Whedon, on the other hand, will release his musical web series “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” in three parts for free, online, for a limited time, then yank them off the web and make the whole show available for purchase.

Speaking of innovative distribution, after being disappointed with the token theatrical release of his indie film “The Nines,” director John August said that “leaking” the film on P2P networks would have built better buzz for the film than playing Sundance. Take that, Robert Redford!

And finally, what better way to wash down those hot dogs than with a little vodka. Kanye West is the latest pitchman for Absolut and created a kooky (though unoriginal) infauxmercial to hawk the beverage.

Now be done with work. Go outside and enjoy the holiday!

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Posted by Chris Albrecht on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  0 Comments
Tags: Kanye West, MacFarlane, NewTeeVee, P2P, Whedon

Updated: Skype, the peer-to-peer VoIP provider and a division of eBay, wants to grow up – both as a company and as a communications utility. To that end, it is launching the beta version of its latest Skype client software.

Josh Silverman, the company’s new CEO, acknowledged that from a usability standpoint, things hadn’t changed much, even as Skype kept adding more features such as embedding third-party plug-ins. Skype needed a better, easier and cleaner client — and Skype 4.0 beta, likely to be available for download tomorrow, is a start. 

 

The new client is going to cause an uproar amongst many Skype loyalists used to the IM-like nature of the current software. With this version, the software takes up the entire PC desktop screen, mostly to accommodate a growing number of features. (Skype Journal’s Jim Courtney & JKontherun tell me that you can change the screen size, though it isn’t that obvious or easy.) I found it hugely annoying as it forced me to constantly toggle between the client and the desktop; merely doubling or tripling the size of the client seems like it would have sufficed. 

The real reason for the redesign, however, is Skype Video, which desperately needed a new layout because it requires an ease-of-use that eludes the current client. As I pointed out a few weeks ago, video communication (which accounts for about 28 percent of total Skype calls) has been one of the fastest-growing features on Skype, thanks to the easy availability of built-in cameras, especially in devices used by mobile workers.

I often use Skype to conduct calls with my friends around the planet, and occasionally for work as well. As the bandwidth on our broadband connections grows, I think the idea of quick video conversations with friends, family and co-workers will catch on. In this era of rising oil prices and unfriendly skies, it makes sense to simply call someone and see them on computer screen.

But back to the software and my initial impressions (their PR team only sent me the beta download link this morning.) I think after people get over the initial shock related to the bigger size, they will quickly learn to love version 4.0.

I found the improved ability to conduct conversations by consolidating the tabs, which allows you to easily switch between various conversations, especially useful. And initiating a video call is dead simple, almost as simple as Apple’s iChat client.

Skype 4.0 is a much more complete communicator, even despite its beta status. With it, using Skype for instant messaging, making video and voice calls, sending files and sending SMS messages are all easier. I think it’s well worth the download (Available for download tomorrow.) But it’s a shame they don’t have a Mac client — the 4.0 version will initially only be available for Windows-based computers — since Mac is my everyday machine.

The company is also working on introducing features such as auto-redial, call transfer, and most importantly, the ability to send money. I guess they figured out how to integrate eBay’s PayPal with Skype. Now wasn’t that worth spending billions of dollars on?

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  11 Comments
Tags: eBay, Josh Silverman, P2P, skype, Skype 4.0, VoIP

Don’t blame me for getting caught up in the whole hoopla around media-buying-media…we media types are known for being narcissists. Blame me for not being able to blog about the new beta of Adobe Flash Player 10, which has built-in P2P features and is able to save files to the local drives. I was reminded by Hank Williams about the new release, and its big impact on the world of video in particular and other web apps in general.As some of you might remember, I wrote about Adobe’s P2P ambitions that revolved around buying a company called Amicima.

Through LinkedIn, we were able to find that amicima co-founder Mathew Kaufman has been working as Senior Computer Scientist for Adobe since October 2006. His co-founder, Michael Thornburgh, is also said to be at Adobe. Both of them have vast experience in networking and P2P technologies. The two of them worked at Tycho Networks, and later at DSL.net, after that company acquired Tycho.

I have been following this closely, and my sources say that this is a solid technology with the potential to seriously disrupt the CDN market, especially those companies that rely on clients. I wonder, for example, what will happen to RedSwoosh, which is owned by Akamai, or to other, similar providers of P2P-based client services. I think one shouldn’t get caught up in the CDN-killer aspect of this technology.

From what I have learnt, there are some elements of this technology that make it necessary to have a server infrastructure for situations where traversing NAT’s/Firewalls isn’t possible. It also needs a centralized registrar is also needed that maintains the ID’s of all the P2P clients (nodes) connected to a service. In other words, a CDN operator work with Adobe, charging for traffic that goes through their proxies as and when needed by the Flash 10. By the way Adobe has an arrangement with Kontiki, a CDN operator of sorts.

Williams’ post digs deeper into this in a thoughtful, intelligent way. “[I]s the innovation that will be unleashed by making P2P technology an assumed part of the web protocol stack?” he wonders. (I think that’s why it’s important that we start harping about upload speeds on our broadband connections.)

The reason we should pay attention to this product is Adobe’s distribution strength. The company can easily upgrade its Flash clients and instantly become owner of one of the largest P2P services. What that means is that now anyone can contemplate a Joost-like service that works within a browser. Using AIR to extend those P2P abilities to the desktop would be fairly easy as well. Ironically, both Joost and Jaman have spent considerable time, money and attention doing this.

The early version of Flash is rather simple, but it does offer a way to lower bandwidth costs while still delivering high-quality video. In addition, companies like Tokbox (our story) and Woome (NTV story) can add more functionality, such as cheaper, live video-voice service, without spending too much money.

It’s clear that Adobe is not going to become a huge P2P service overnight. But this release does portend to an interesting future.

PS: If anyone wants to share their thoughts, please leave a comment or drop me an email.

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  27 Comments
Tags: Adobe, AIR, Flash, P2P, Red Swoosh

Network management practices employed by Bell Canada have led the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic to ask for an investigation of the telecommunications company. The CIPPIC, a University of Ottawa legal clinic, accuses the firm of using deep packet inspection tools to determine what customers are doing with their Internet connections and then blocking traffic, such as that of BitTorrent. O, Bell Canada, following in the footsteps of Ma Bell (the newer) when it comes to P2P throttling is no way to to play.

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Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  4 Comments
Tags: AT&T, Bell Canada, P2P, T

Not a day goes by without someone bemoaning the evils of peer-to-peer networking, painting visions of a network apocalypse brought on by pimply-faced file stealers. And to make their case, naysayers typically present some hard-to-argue-with stats. This week, however, we came across a set of numbers that show more traditional video sources (streaming and flash video, for example) are now an increasing component of bandwidth on consumer-focused broadband networks.

As part of the research I’m doing for another piece, I had a long conversation with Danny McPherson, CTO of Arbor Networks, which makes all sorts of network-management and traffic-shaping tools. Arbor is used by dozens of ISPs around the planet and, as a result, McPherson is privy to details about traffic flows and usage patterns across many broadband networks.

McPherson shared with me some interesting stats and facts about broadband usage and peer-to-peer networking usage patterns. Given that Arbor makes a living selling its technology and products to carriers, it is prudent to maintain a degree of skepticism about the numbers. That said, they are nevertheless interesting enough to share.

On fixed and mobile broadband networks where consumer services are provided (i.e., NOT interprovider or typical dedicated Internet access for commercial enterprises):

• 10 percent of subscribers consume 80 percent of bandwidth.
• 0.5 percent of subscribers consume about 40 percent of total bandwidth
• 80 percent of subscribers use less than 10 percent of bandwidth

This supports the arguments made by some of the larger ISPs, including Comcast. In a recent interview, Comcast Cable CTO Tony Werner told me his company would try and deal with the tiny number of subscribers who use most of the bandwidth by slowing down their connections during peak times. (Personally, I find that to be a distasteful solution, and I believe that folks should learn from newer ISPs like Free.fr and better architect their networks so they can provide more bandwidth for all — without imposing any penalties.)

The P2P stats are the ones that came as a complete surprise. Like you, I have read many reports that suggest P2P applications account for the majority of the traffic on high-speed networks. But McPherson’s data suggests otherwise:

• 20 percent of traffic is P2P applications
• During peak-load times, 70 percent of subscribers use http while 20 percent are using P2P
• Http still makes up the majority of the total traffic, of which 45 percent is traditional web content that includes text and images. Streaming video and audio content from services like YouTube accounts for nearly 50 percent of the http traffic. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone — streaming TV shows from Hulu and videos from YouTube have been on a major upswing, as noted by our colleagues over on NewTeeVee.

So, what do you make of these numbers?

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  51 Comments
Tags: Arbor Networks, P2P

Now we know why none of the major carriers showed up for Thursday’s open FCC meeting at Stanford University: Who wants to take on Larry Lessig, the lion of Net Neutrality, in his own den?

Class was in session when Stanford law prof Lessig delivered a powerful lecture on the need for neutral networks, telling the assembled FCC chairman and commissioners to their faces that they were part of a 10-year-long failure by the agency to “make a clear statement of policy” about how infractions against the open, end-to-end connectivity of the Internet would be policed or enforced.

Lessig’s key points — which included the assertion that the historic openness of the Internet has been the key to its economic boom — are important to record, since they are very likely to become key talking points for Net Neutrality proponents as the battle over potential neutrality regulation heats up during the current congressional session. But the lack of a viable opponent in the arena made for a somewhat lukewarm event, with more than half the auditorium’s reported 716 seats going empty. Those who were present cheered mightily for Lessig, while only issuing soft “boos” for Republican FCC commissioners Robert McDowell and Deborah Tate, whose brief remarks basically indicated their opposition to any Net Neutrality regulations.

Unlike the other assembled panelists, who had just a few minutes to present their specific-interest cases, Lessig was given all the time he needed to make a strong case for the need for clear network neutrality policies, either from the FCC or Congress. Two of his stronger points, which you can expect to see repeated, were one, that Net Neutrality principles have been the historic base of the Internet, and have been responsible for its unbridled competition and growth. And two, that providers should be governed by clear rules that make it more expensive for them to restrict network access than to provide broadband that doesn’t differentiate or prioritize different traffic types.

The FCC, Lessig said, should pass rules that make it more profitable for service providers to behave than to misbehave. “You have to make it so playing the games is not a good business model for them,” Lessig said. “If we really didn’t have a reason to worry that they were playing games [with network management], then what they did inside their networks would be of less concern.”

Though invited by FCC chairman Kevin Martin, all the major Internet service providers — AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner Cable, among others — declined to participate in Thursday’s open meeting. Comcast, which waded into a debacle on several levels at the last such open meeting at Harvard, was slammed by several panelists Thursday, including by Robb Topolski, who is credited as being one of the first to detect Comcast’s disputed P2P blocking activities.

Comcast’s activities, Topolski said, “are non-standard, and not accepted by the industry.” And Jon Peha, a computer engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon, disputed Comcast’s claims that it wasn’t “blocking” traffic, part of an seemingly unsolved question that Lessig said was at the heart of the problem.

“The most outrageous thing is that [the FCC] can’t get the facts straight,” Lessig said with regards to the Comcast controversy, expressing wonderment that a government body like the FCC was still somewhat in the dark about what Comcast was or wasn’t doing. “The least we should be able to do is get the truth about what is happening,” Lessig said.

Watch the entire session on video.

Paul Kapustka, former managing editor for GigaOM, now has his own blog at Sidecut Reports.

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Posted by Paul Kapustka on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  12 Comments
Tags: Comcast, fcc, lessig, Net Neutrality, P2P

Comcast said today it plans to create a “P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” in cooperation with P2P companies and other ISPs. The bill is supposed to be a catalog of best-practice recommendations for P2P companies and ISPs alike, but the announcement was more than vague about what those recommendations might look like. NewTeeVee has the full story.

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Posted by Edit Staff on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  0 Comments
Tags: cmcsa, Comcast, isp, P2P, pando

Peer-to-peer TV start-up Joost will make live-streaming video available to all its users tomorrow; it has also scored a deal with its investor CBS to live stream March Madness. A new client should be ready for download by about noon ET on Wednesday, reports NewTeeVee.

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Posted by Edit Staff on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  4 Comments
Tags: Joost, Live TV, P2P

Data traffic management, viewed as a vile practice on the wired networks, could actually prove to be useful when it comes to the smooth functioning of wireless broadband networks, thanks to a novel new approach and technology developed by Bell Labs and introduced today by its corporate parent, Alcatel-Lucent.

In recent months, there has been steady growth in the number of wireless data users, who are sharing a finite amount of air spectrum and wireless resources such as airtime, RF channels and bandwidth. With the emergence of unlimited data plans, we might see more stress on the wireless data networks as more devices come online. The situation will get worse when 4G technologies like LTE start to get deployed.

What network operators would need is a new kind of networking management tool that goes beyond the current generation of tools that are geared towards voice quality. The traffic-shaping tools used on the wired networks are also of limited utility. So, Alcatel-Lucent, the somewhat humbled telecom hardware maker that counts wireless operators like Verizon amongst its customers, is introducing a new product that does precisely that. Canada’s Bell Mobility is currently running trials of this awkwardly named product, Alcatel-Lucent 9900 Wireless Network Guardian (WNG).

The Alcatel-Lucent 9900 WNG is composed of two network elements: a wireless network detector, for deployment in the data center, and a wireless network central, for deployment in a network or security operations center. The Alcatel-Lucent 9900 WNG monitors network traffic at a granular level, identifies anomalous wireless behaviors which could degrade network performance and impact subscriber’s experience.

Anyway, what WNG does is business allows carriers to better utilize their wireless data bandwidth. While on wired networks, the common belief that data is data hold true, but on wireless that is not the case. Alcatel-Lucent executives whom I met with last week insist that wireless e-mail data consumption is very different from, say, downloading files. Why? Because e-mail devices such as the BlackBerry are constantly polling the mail servers and keeping wireless data channels occupied. According to Alcatel-Lucent data, 1 MB of e-mail data consumes two hours of airtime and involves 1,500 signaling events while the same 1 MB on a P2P application takes 30 seconds and involves 0.3 signaling events.

The technology for the device has come from the bowels of the famed (if somewhat shrunken) Bell Labs. (It is part of a new plan to commercialize Bell Labs’ breakthroughs, according to Wim Sweldens, VP with Alcatel-Lucent Ventures.) It allows the carriers to find out the impact of a connection on the radios, towers and other wireless network elements.

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  8 Comments
Tags: Alcatel-Lucent, Comcast, P2P, Traffic Shaping

AllPeers, a personal P2P file-sharing startup based in Oxford, England, is down for the count. The company founders announced on AllPeers’ blog about the startup’s plans to shut down.

The personal P2P file-sharing space is a crowded one; not many companies can claim success. AllPeers tried to get traction by going open source back in March 2007, but that failed to boost their growth.

Co-founder Matthew Gertner emailed Liz Gannes with this response to her query:

Basically our investors had certain expectations in terms of user base growth. We were very happy with the adoption of the product but they weren’t. When we ran out of cash they weren’t willing to provide additional funding, so we have no choice but to shut the service down. The source code for our client is already open source, and we’re planning to put it up on an independent site like SourceForge or Google Code in case it can be of use to others. We’re still deciding what to do with the server code, but there’s a good chance that we’ll decide to open source that as well.

AllPeers was backed by Index Ventures. I expect to see a brutal shakeout in this particular sector of the file-sharing business. The good news (if you can call it that) is that the AllPeers blog, “Peer Pressure,” is going to stay in business. I have enjoyed Matthew and Cedric’s writings and am glad to hear that they will still be sharing their viewpoints on everything from the web to P2P to startup life.

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  10 Comments
Tags: Allpeers, DotFlop Club, Index Ventures, P2P

BitTorrent, the San Francisco-based company that has long been looking for a new chief executive officer, has finally found one: Douglas Walker, former chief executive of Alias Systems. The company also added Eric Klinker, former chief technology of Internap (INAP), as its new CTO. These moves indicate that the P2P technology company is finally ready to shed its not-so-successful consumer efforts and instead focus on becoming an infrastructure-type player. It will compete with a growing number of similarly focused companies, including some still-in-stealth-mode startups

The company recently launched its BitTorrent Delivery Network Architecture (DNA) offerings. Klinker and his data center hosting credentials are a good indicator that BitTorrent is going to be beefing up its network delivery infrastructure. BitTorrent has been working with a handful of set-top box makers such as Pace Micro, and is trying to embed its technologies into other such IP set-top boxes. I think that after being a bit directionless for a while, BitTorrent is finally finding its bearings — though it is hard not to look at the competitive landscape and wonder if they can make money.

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  9 Comments
Tags: BitTorrent, P2P, Pace Micro