Will polluting P2P environments drive away users?

September 4, 2002

On Business 2.0 we can find an interesting article about a paper for an applied mathematics class. The paper is about the way the entertainment companies can stop the trading of copyrighted material.

Some are are bombing networks like Gnutella and Morpheus with phony files that have the same titles and number of bytes as popular songs, but instead contain annoying music looped to play repeatedly. Others aim to slow down the networks with excess requests. But will this work?

Definitely, say Andrew Chen and Andrew Schroeder, two University of Washington seniors. In a term paper for their applied mathematics class last winter, Chen and Schroeder borrowed from environmental studies to conclude that polluting the P2P milieu with phony files is indeed a more effective strategy for the record labels than lawsuits.Like a school of fish, a network needs a critical mass of members to thrive but can attain it only under certain conditions. In the case of fish, the availability of food and the size of the pond help control the population; in the case of networks, bandwidth and a reliable supply of downloadable files are key. As any old angler knows, ruining a habitat can trigger a catastrophe in a fish population.

Borrowing a classic formula that ecologists use for predicting an animal population's tipping point, called the depensation model, the students argued that it isn't necessary to drive away all the users on the network, just a subset. Flooding a network with spoofed files would drive users to more reliable music sources -- like the labels' own online sites. The same goes for broadcasting a torrent of requests that would slow down the network. Given enough information on the size of the network, the critical mass necessary to sustain it, and the number of fake files, one could calculate the tipping point at which users would abandon a P2P network.

The report is called "A Modified Depensation Model for Peer to Peer Networks: Systemic Catastrophes and Other Potential Weaknesses". I think the proposed options are not very friendly (understatement ) and I actually doubt it will work. Perhaps on the great masses.