Zennstrom double whammy - hot off the press

Life is full of coincidences, they say. Two news stories today involve the brilliant brainchildren (is that the plural of brainchild?) of one man, Niklas Zennstrom. First - Technology Guardian carried a report this morning that indicates that "police and intelligence services" in the UK want to be able to monitor internet telephony, with their main target, of course, being Skype. The complexities - technical, legal, ethical, political - in such a quest are immense, not least the global nature of the 'industry' and the P2P basis upon which it works. The 'simple' task of identifying a VOIP caller, for instance, is, in fact, hugely problematic. The moral issues involved are even bigger, I would suggest. And, within the past hour or so, the big global music and film companies have agreed a settlement with Kazaa - see, for example, the Los Angeles Times - in which Kazaa will turn itself into a 'legal' download service, and it will pay more than $100m to the industry in compensation for the loss of revenue claimed by them. Kazaa was deemed to have been the most downloaded piece of software in history, and appears to have accounted for almost 80% of all file-sharing activities world-wide. Zennstrom launched Kazaa in 2000 and immediately started looking around to see how next the same P2P technology could be used - and Skype was launched as a result in 2003. His company also came up with an interesting take on the area of content distribution with a tool called PeerEnabler, again using the same P2P methodologies. See The Register for a description of the software.

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© John Connell
The views expressed in this weblog are entirely my own and are not intended to reflect the views of any other individuals or organizations. All sources will be fully acknowledged.