Volumes of 'free-riders' found on Gnutella

PALO ALTO, California (Reuters) -- Popular song-swapping sites like Napster and Gnutella have come under attack by the record industry, but a new study suggests they could face a more insidious threat from their own users who take free music more often than they contribute any.

The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center here said it found that 70 percent of the people who use Gnutella to download music do not share any of their own files. Aside from limiting the selection of music, this pattern of "free-riding" threatens to degrade the service's performance and leave it more vulnerable to hackers and lawsuits, study authors said.

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"The main thing that surprised us was the extent of the free-riding," said Eytan Adar, who coauthored the study. "The biggest concern is that the system looks less like a decentralized system and more like a centralized one."

Adar said his findings were based on a 24-hour snapshot of the Gnutella service, which revealed that 1 percent of the users served close to 50 percent of the requests and 25 percent served 98 percent of the requests.

Adar could not say with certainty whether the same patterns existed on Napster and other song-swapping sites. He said that Napster had more built-in features to encourage file sharing but that those features could be easily circumvented.

Sites like Napster and Gnutella have gained popularity as "peer-to-peer" services in which users can swap songs over the Internet. But if only a few users are providing the bulk of the music, it is not really a peer-to-peer service at all, Adar asserts.

"The computers handling the bulk of queries may become unable to deal with all the traffic that is coming to them, which could potentially cause the system to fall and crash," he said. Those few overworked computers could also become easy targets of lawsuits and hackers, the study says.

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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