P2P caching: Unsafe at any speed?

Peer-to-peer traffic is one of the biggest headaches for Internet service providers, but now a Swedish company says it has developed technology that can help handle the load. Last week, Stockholm-based Joltid said three major service providers in Europe licensed its PeerCache technology--software designed to reduce costs of network traffic by caching frequently traded digital files within file-swapping systems.

PeerCache is built to work for FastTrack, one of the most widely used P2P protocols and the underpinnings of such popular applications as Kazaa and iMesh. Joltid said its traffic on FastTrack protocols can account for nearly 70 percent of the network's total bandwidth. PeerCache plugs in to the ISP network and temporarily caches FastTrack P2P traffic, helping to lessen the bandwidth burden. But the technology could prove controversial, by putting ISPs in the hot seat in the Internet piracy debate. One indicator of this potential is that Joltid's European partners have not publicly disclosed their association with the company.

In the United States, copyright laws protect ISPs from liability for their users' activities. With PeerCache software, ISPs would cache, or temporarily hold, digital copies of pirated files on their servers so they're more easily accessible to traders on Kazaa and other FastTrack systems. But holding copies of copyrighted material could make ISPs accomplices in illegal file trading, at least according to an early survey by one recording-industry trade association.

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