Peer-to-Peer

Chapter 4. The Cornucopia of the Commons

Dan Bricklin, Cocreator of Visicalc

Let’s get to the bottom of the Napster phenomenon—why is this music trading service so popular? One could say, trivially, that Napster is successful because you can find what you want (a particular song) and get it easily. It’s also pretty obvious that songs are easy to find because so many of them are available through Napster. If Napster let me get only a few popular songs, once I downloaded those I’d lose interest fast.

But what’s the root cause? Why are so many songs available? Hint: It has nothing to do with peer-to-peer. Peer-to-peer is plumbing, and most people don’t care about plumbing. While the “look into other people’s computers and copy directly” method has some psychological benefit to people who understand what’s going on (as indicated by thinkers such as Tom Matrullo and Dave Winer), I think the peer-to-peer aspects actually get in the way of Napster.

Let’s be blunt: Napster would operate much better if, when you logged in, it uploaded all the songs from your disk that weren’t already in the Napster database. If the songs were copied to a master server, rather than just the names of the songs and who was currently logged in, the same songs would be available for download provided by the same people, but at all times (not just when the “owner” happened to be connected to the Internet), and probably through more reliable and higher-speed connections to the Internet. (Akamai provides the kind of ...