Ian Clarke, who recently relocated from LA to Edinburgh, Scotland, says, “I just threw together an article on what may be the latest threat to P2P, and this one comes from within the industry.” Snip:
Altnet, the company most responsible for the proliferation of spyware, recently acquired a patent which allows easy identification of files on a P2P network. In the words of Derek Broes, Altnet’s executive vice president of worldwide operations, Altnet will “…focus on protecting and commercializing our patented technology and realizing the potential it offers content owners by commercializing peer-to-peer networks”. Just another day in the world of little-league software companies you think. Not so.
Unfortunately, there are a few problems with this picture. The so-called “Truenames” patent, filed in 1997, is little-more than a marketspeak-friendly name slapped on a decades old and widely known technique in computer science called “hashing”. A hashing algorithm takes a file, and produces a “signature” for that file, a short set of letters and numbers that, for any two identical files, will always be the same. This technique has often been used to detect identical files, or to verify the integrity of software downloaded over the Internet. Clearly, it requires very little imagination to suppose that hashing might also prove useful when verifying the integrity of files on a P2P network.
This, of course, puts Mr Broes’ quote in a somewhat sinister new light. In a classic example of P.R “doublespeak”, what he refers to as protection, most would see as an anti-competitive offensive, and what he refers to as commercialization, most would refer to as extortion. Yes, the implication of recent public statements from Altnet is that they plan to use their government granted monopoly on an obvious idea to force other P2P companies, through threat of litigation, into cooperating with whatever scheme they are cooking up.