Sandeep's Peer-to-Peer Resources Page

Introduction

Welcome to Sandeep Krishnamurthy's p2p resources page. On this page, I am not interested in posting p2p news. Rather, the focus is on analysis, interpretation and commentary. If you have cool links or ideas, e-mail Sandeep at sandeep@u.washington.edu.

If you are new to this topic, I would suggest visiting Salon's Napster directory and CNN.com's links on the topic. A good set of links to Napster-related sites is available at The Ultimate Napster Resource Site. Also, Cnet's two videos on the power of p2p and next-generation p2p companies are worthwhile overviews of what everybody is talking about. You can view this at Cnet's video page.

One of the inspirations for all this was the SETI@Home project out of the University of California, Berkeley.

Student Reports

In the Winter quarter of 2001, MBA students in my Marketing Management course conducted an in-depth analysis of Napster from different perspectives. The reports are given below- all files are Word documents.

Analysis of Peer-to-Peer Technology

(Written by Raul Biascoechea, Kristina Bowzer, Tony Chu, Sarah Kerrigan and David Schultz)

Strains of Napster(i.e., Gnutella etc.)

(Written by Debbie Anderson, Patrick Hazelwood, Steve Hill, Maren Ohaks and Dawn Palmer)

Analysis of Napster from the Perspective of Record Labels

(Written by Jeff Eckard, Doug Torseth, Laura van Haaren, Enrique Alvarado et. al.)

Analysis of Napster from the perspective of the music reseller

(Written by Bianca Stephens, Greg Mansfield, John Gaska and Ruobo Lu)

Analysis of Napster from an artist perspective

(Written by Lea Wong, Mike van den Berg, Richard Zhang and Todd Anthony)

Analysis of Napster from the consumer perspective

(Written by Rosemary Hall, Tushar Mehta, Angela Gollnick, Natasha and Shane Roberts)

Analysis of Napster from a Legal Perspective

(Written by Jack Chen, Todd Dubois and Colm Flynn)

One student's summary of what he learned from these reports

(Written by Phillip Ackerman)

Insightful Resources

Following the latest court ruling against Napster(February 12, 2001), National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation" had a 1 hour show (actually, it runs for about 48 minutes) on the future of Napster. You can hear this entertaining conversation using Real Player by clicking here.

Pete Fader's analysis of Napster is interesting and well-done. He makes the provocative argument that Napster is really a product sampling forum that enhances the market for CDs.

My friend, Madhukar Shukla introduced me to "The P2P Report". Jaime Murphy from Australia and Charles Hofacker convincingly argue that the record companies are stuck in an antiquated mindset.

Pete Fader's analysis of Napster is interesting and well-done. He makes the provocative argument that Napster is really a product sampling forum that enhances the market for CDs.

Adar and Huberman from PARC XEROX have written an interesting paper arguing that free-riding will kill content-sharing-networks such as Gnutella.

I also enjoyed Charles Mann's article on Napster in The Atlantic Monthly. His focus is really on the cultural implications.

Randy Picker, a University of Chicago Law Professor, has proposed a compromise solution for the Napster conundrum.

Dan Bricklin has argued that Napster was successful for other reasons- not because it used peer-to-peer networking. He is trying to popularize the term friend-to-friend networking.

Bill Joy, Sun Microsystems' chief scientist, has interesting things to say about peer-to-peer networking. Of course, all technical people like to point out that is not new stuff.

From a legal perspective, Lawrence Lessig, seems to be the authority. He has written an interesting brief defending Napster. He belongs to the group of legal scholars who are arguing that excessive enforcement of copyright law may not necessarily lead to positive consequences.

The Future

is unwritten.... Do you want to help write it?

The counter below measures the number of impressions since 10 a.m. pacific time on March 2, 2001.