WASHINGTON -- Napster is moribund, MusicCity and Grokster are fighting for their lives in court and entertainment industry lawyers seem to be just getting started.
Yet peer-to-peer's future is cheery and perhaps eventually profitable, say devotees who gathered at the industry's biggest conference on Wednesday.
"What's exciting about peer-to-peer is that devices that used to be just clients are servers," said Kelly Truelove, CEO of Clip2.com. "This is something that wasn't in vogue six years ago -- today it's a big part of the Net."
Of course, being a big part of everything online doesn't mean you're a profitable part of anything. Truelove's company is now defunct, and PopularPower.com, home to co-panelist Nelson Minar, says on its website that it's "no longer in business."
But speakers at the O'Reilly Peer-to-Peer Conference put a sunny face on the dot-com crash, predicting that the industry's trend is away from mere file-swapping and toward greater commercialization and distributed computing -- especially in biological and life sciences where data-sharing can be done collaboratively.
"IT spending in life sciences is growing," said Steven Armentrout, CEO of Parabon Computation of Fairfax, Virginia, which markets distributive computing as an alternative to investments in large, hyper-fast computers.
Parabon also runs the Compute Against Cancer website, a philanthropic effort to harness the Internet's computing power in the fight against cancer. Users can download software and contribute spare computing cycles to research being conducted by the National Cancer Institute, West Virginia University or the University of Maryland.
Armentrout said distributed computing is so effective because maintenance and depreciation of a supercomputer can come out to 100 percent of the purchase price. But he admits it won't be an easy sell: "This is a big-minded business model."
Avaki, a startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts, takes a different approach, stressing a collaborative network for computation and file-sharing that's also high-security. Avaki's founders call this a "grid" approach that links different operating systems and "enables secure access to and sharing of data throughout the enterprise, spanning systems, sites, domains and networks."
Andrew Grimshaw, CTO of Avaki, says that his software can be used by "mutually distrustful organizations and individuals" without risking their computer's security.
No conference in this area would be complete without Larry Lessig, the Stanford University law professor and frequent critic of recent expansions of intellectual property law.
Lessig offered an impassioned defense of indicted Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov, who became a martyr to the free software movement after the FBI arrested him on charges of criminal copyright violations. Sklyarov pled not guilty in August to writing an application that bypasses security encryption in Adobe System's Acrobat eBook Reader.
"There are both good and bad uses for technology. We don't attack the technology -- we attack the users," Lessig said. "(Sklyarov's) technology can be used to do horrible things. Dmitry Sklyarov's technology does good things -- for example, the Constitution commands that we have fair use over copyrighted material.
"You should be free to develop technology without fear of being locked up because of illegal uses," Lessig said.
Ben Polen contributed to this report.
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