Now that last month's raid on BitTorrent seems to be settling down, I think it's time to put some thought into where peer-to-peer file-sharing (P2P) is going from here. And so begins a series of stream-of-consciousness posts on the subject.

To recap, BitTorrent is the current champ of P2P technologies, taking over from Napster, Audiogalaxy and KaZaa before it. BitTorrent is especially well-suited for transferring very large files, and its success has tracked with the rise in sharing of TV episodes and movies. These changes have also coincided with the continued penetration into homes of broadband Internet access.¹ Thus, even someone who is relatively new to the process can easily download, for instance, the entire third season of Scrubs over a span of a couple days.

The ironic thing is, BitTorrent was supposedly never meant for the sharing of copyrighted material, which, let's be honest, Napster et al. were. It was designed to let people with large files but little bandwidth (say, an indie band who wanted to get an out-of-print out to their potential audience, or a Linux hacker with a new mod to get out to his user base) use the available bandwidth of their users' connections to ease the download burden. There is no central server with BitTorrent, there is only a tracker which points you to other end-users that are sharing the file you want. As soon as you begin downloading, you are also sharing the file with others.

(For more on the genesis of BitTorrent, see this Wired interview with creator Bram Cohen.)

BitTorrent's major flaw as a P2P mechanism (though one which has not slowed its growth at all) is that there is no such thing as anonymity on any BitTorrent network. When you connect to a tracker, it logs your IP address, and many trackers make that information visible via a relatively open web interface. That means that if you're connecting from your home broadband connection, the MPAA, the RIAA or whomever else is interested can look at your IP, trace it to your ISP and be on your ass the next day. The only way to use BitTorrent "safely" is to find an untraceable, open connection somewhere. This may be more difficult than it sounds. I spend most of my away-from-home time on a major university campus, and I have found exactly three unsecured connections, all ethernet ports that require no authentication. The only information being gathered by them is my laptop's 100Base-T MAC address, which is not connected in any way to any identifying information about myself. There are also at least two nearby coffeeshops that have unsecured wireless networks (the many other nearby coffeeshops might as well, but I haven't tried them).² Everything else, including our ubiquitous campus wireless network requires something traceable.

Enter eXeem. A product of the people behind the now-defunct Suprnova torrent distribution site, eXeem's primary purpose is to do away with the centralized tracker aspect of BitTorrent, and thus make sure that no legal eagles can figure out who you are while you download the unrated director's cut of "Eurotrip." Even though it hasn't officially been released (it's still in public testing), eXeem has had some controversy come its way -- the most recent test version includes a piece of spyware called Cydoor. Naturally, somebody else came along and released a stripped version of eXeem called, yes, eXeem Lite, and yes, the eXeem people are pissed.

While it is amusing to think of eXeem's creators being angry that their intellectual property is being used without their consent, I'm more concerned with the way they've designed the eXeem system -- as far as I can tell, it's just as vulnerable as any other P2P setup. The good news for end-users is that with no trackers, there's no easy way for the MPAA to watch what you're doing. The bad news is that, to get started, you have to connect to a central eXeem server, which will almost certainly be the subject of legal attacks in the coming months. With that server gone, eXeem either splinters into a series of small, community-run networks, or more likely goes away entirely, much the way Napster's OpenNap networks failed to catch on.

In that Wired piece, an executive VP from CBS says he figures the networks have about ten years to make content-on-demand work before they're swamped by downloading. Despite BitTorrent's weaknesses and unlikelihood that eXeem will fix them, I think it's a much shorter timeframe than that, and I'll get to why in the next post. I don't think the history of file-sharing bears out that kind of slow burn.

1 I think broadband is the most important factor here, but the amazing rates at which hard drive and RAM prices are dropping, and at which processor speeds are rising, also contribute. I imagine that, if I wrote this post six months into the future, DVD burners and DivX-capable DVD players would also play key roles.

2 [Edited to add that "safe" downloading also requires that you find an open, public tracker -- that is, one that doesn't require you to log in to it.]