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[FYI] Swarm Radio - "Alluvium"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/29436.html
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Swarm Radio - a cheaper, faster 'casting tech
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Posted: 24/02/2003 at 03:03 GMT
The technology behind the next generation of file sharing legal
battles was unveiled at CodeCon today. Brandon Wiley describes
Alluvium as "Peer to Peer radio" - which it is, but it also blurs the
distinction between streaming and downloading once and forever.
[...]
With distributed "swarm" downloading technologies such as BitTorrent
and Tornado - which has half a million users already - it's possible
for hundreds of users to download a file without hammering the
server. They take advantage of the under-used uplink capacity of your
net connection to upload portions of the file to another user. So
when you download a file from a given location, you're actually
getting it from many other users in chunks.
[...]
Now why, you're wondering, would this prompt legal issues? Well,
there's an explicit distinction at the moment between streaming
(which the RIAA thinks is OK, so long as the broadcasters pay
royalties) and downloading (which is not OK under any circumstances).
Technically they're similar in that both Alluvium and {insert your
favorite streaming player here} leave stub files in the cache which
they delete after the session has finished.
But Alluvium is a streaming technology that uses file downloading
techniques. So some legal clarification will need to be made.
[...]
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