[A2k] Media companies embrace peer-to-peer technology

[Judit Rius Sanjuan]

Thanks to BNA Internet Law News for this news-story:

http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_8583211?nclick_check=1
Media companies embrace peer-to-peer technology
NETWORKS GO LEGIT, BUT PIRACY STILL WIDELY PRACTICED
By Peter Svensson
Associated Press
Article Launched: 03/15/2008 01:35:25 AM PDT

NEW YORK - The technology best known for pirating movies, music and
software online is increasingly being adopted by businesses as a cheap
way to get video content to customers.

A number of start-ups are embracing so-called peer-to-peer technology
and have persuaded some big-name media companies to use them to
deliver legal content.

"In 2005 when we met with content owners, 'peer-to-peer' was a dirty
word," said Robert Levitan, chief executive of file-sharing company
Pando Networks. "In 2007, finally, content owners came and said 'Yeah,
we think there's a role for P2P.' "

Levitan was speaking Friday at the first P2P Market Conference of the
Distributed Computing Industry Association, a trade group with more
than 100 members.

Pando is prime example of mainstream acceptance: It's providing the
means for NBC to provide DVD-quality downloads of its shows, including
"The Tonight Show" with Jay Leno.

But 90 percent of P2P downloads are still of illegally copied content,
according to David Hahn, vice president of product management at
SafeNet, which tracks the networks.

Hahn said 12 million to 15 million people are file-sharing across the
world at any one time, mainly on the BitTorrent and eDonkey networks.
The attraction of file-sharing is not just that it's free - there's
also content available that can't be had by legal means, like TV shows
that haven't aired in Europe.

The BitTorrent software was invented and set free on the Net in 2002
by Bram Cohen. He later started a company to profit from the
technology. In 2005, BitTorrent stopped providing links to copyright
content and now helps studios distribute movies.

Overall, acceptance of P2P technology is higher in Western Europe,
where piracy using the technology also happens to be especially
rampant, according to SafeNet.

The British Broadcasting Corp. uses P2P technology from Mountain View-
based VeriSign for its iPlayer, which streams some of its most popular
shows. French TV channels are using software from 1-Click Media, which
claims 1 million users a day. The Norwegian public broadcasting
service recently started using BitTorrent software to get its shows out.

Media companies don't need P2P technology to provide video over the
Internet. They can hire so-called content delivery networks, or CDNs,
to get the media to their customers, at a cost of about 25 to 35 cents
per gigabyte. Doug Walker, chief executive of BitTorrent, put the size
of this market at $680 million this year.

But P2P technology can offload much of the work of the CDNs by having
subscribers who have downloaded the data already send it to
subscribers who haven't. That cuts the cost of delivery by 50 to 90
percent, according to several of the companies presenting at the
conference.

The P2P programs used by Pando and VeriSign are quite different from
BitTorrent and eDonkey. They don't let consumers distribute their own
content. What comes down the pipe is strictly from the media companies
that contract with the P2P companies. The consumers may not even know
they're using P2P software - all they know is that they've installed
video player software on the computer.

So far, Internet service providers have been left out of the equation
even though they're saddled with the burden of conveying all the extra
traffic. Some of them have partially blocked or slowed down P2P
traffic to keep it from swamping their networks.

But the adversarial relationship is changing: At the conference,
Verizon Communications presented results of a test that showed that by
sharing information on its network with Pando so it could optimize
downloads, the companies were able to speed downloads and reduce
Verizon's cost of carrying the traffic.

However, not all Internet service providers are likely to get on board
with that solution. It may work well for phone companies, but cable
companies have a different structure to their networks, and it may not
address their concerns.


Judit Rius Sanjuan
Attorney at Knowledge Ecology International
www.keionline.org / www.cptech.org
Phone: +1.202.332.2670, x18
Email: judit.rius@keionline.org