Who's the Next Napster?

Researchers find even peer-to-peer sites start to form clumps of most active (and liable) participants.

Ashlee Vance, IDG News Service

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Researchers Eytan Adar and Bernardo Huberman of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center watched the action on Gnutella for a single 24-hour weekend period in August. But during that time, they tracked the actions of nearly 32,000 participants involving more than 3 million files.

Most of Gnutella's visitors are what the researchers dub "free riders," who take files without responding to queries by other people on the network. Such behavior by Gnutella fans may draw the kind of legal heat file sharer Napster is currently experiencing, the pair predicts.

Napster is being sued by the Recording Industry Association of America and individual record labels for copyright infringement over its music-swapping service (see "Is Napster Really Theft?").

Building Mini-Napsters

The PARC scientists used a modified Java-based Gnutella client to observe a final count of 31,395 hosts and more than 3 million files and found that only a relatively small number of participants share desired files.

The study claims the top 1 percent (314 hosts) contribute about 40 percent of the total files shared. The number of files shared skyrockets to 98 percent for the top 20 percent of users (6250 hosts).

That casts those very active participants in a role resembling Napster itself, which operates central servers where people search for songs. Although Gnutella does not maintain central servers, the lopsided participation means only a few users provide the bulk of available files, and those core traders begin to look like a central repository. With that heavy traffic could come legal consequences, the researchers say. (See "MP3 and You: Know Your Rights.")

"As more people free ride, the system looks more and more centralized," Adar says. "Gnutella is starting to look more and more like Napster."

During the 24-hour period, 70 percent of Gnutella users failed to share a single file, according to Adar and Huberman. Also, 90 percent of the music fans did not answer queries for particular songs or titles by certain artists.

Stingy With Songs

The pair also found that "free riding" figures distributed equally among Net domains, showing that such behavior spans age groups, locations, and levels of connectivity, with no single group contributing more significantly than any other.

"There was a high number of people who weren't sharing anything," Adar says. "People send out queries, and the other users don't write back at all."

Gnutella participants download or develop an application that complies with the Gnutella protocol. The application operates as a client or a server as well as a high-level network, routing information across servers and clients. To join the system, users connect to one of numerous known hosts that forward the IP and port address information to others on the Gnutella network. (See "Napster's Loss Is Competitors' Gain.")

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