Grokster
Ltd. is a privately-owned software company based
in Nevis, West Indies whose viability is unclear
following a United States Supreme Court ruling
against its mainstay product, a peer-to-peer file
sharing program for computers running the Microsoft
Windows operating system. The product is similar
in look and feel to Kazaa which is marketed by
Sharman Networks.
learn more about p2p
A peer-to-peer (or P2P) computer network is a
network that relies primarily on the computing
power and bandwidth of the participants in the
network rather than concentrating it in a relatively
low number of servers. P2P networks are typically
used for connecting nodes via largely ad hoc connections.
Such networks are useful for many purposes. Sharing
content files (see file sharing) containing audio,
video, data or anything in digital format is very
common, and realtime data, such as telephony traffic,
is also passed using P2P technology.
A pure peer-to-peer network does not have the
notion of clients or servers, but only equal peer
nodes that simultaneously function as both "clients"
and "servers" to the other nodes on
the network. This model of network arrangement
differs from the client-server model where communication
is usually to and from a central server. A typical
example for a non peer-to-peer file transfer is
an FTP server where the client and server programs
are quite distinct, and the clients initiate the
download/uploads and the servers react to and
satisfy these requests.
Some networks and channels, such as Napster,
OpenNAP, or IRC @find, use a client-server structure
for some tasks (e.g., searching) and a peer-to-peer
structure for others. Networks such as Gnutella
or Freenet use a peer-to-peer structure for all
purposes, and are sometimes referred to as true
peer-to-peer networks, although Gnutella is greatly
facilitated by directory servers that inform peers
of the network addresses of other peers.
This article is licensed under the GNU
Free Documentation License. It uses material
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/p2p. |
