The tragedy of the Commons — Arms Race within Peer-to-Peer Tools

Abstract

The two major concerns about peer-to-peer are anonymity and non-censorship of documents. Music industry has highlighted these questions by forcing Napster to filter out copyright protected MP3 files and taking legal actions against local users by monitoring their stored MP3 files. Our investigation shows that when copyright protected files are filtered out, users stop downloading public music as well. The success of a distributed peer-to-peer system is dependent on both cooperating coalitions and an antagonistic arms race. An individual will benefit from cooperation if it is possible to identify other users and the cost for doing services is negligible. An arms race between antagonistic participants using more and more refined agents is a plausible outcome. Instead of “the tragedy of the common” we are witnessing “the tragedy of arms race within the common”. Arms race does not need to be a tragedy because these new tools developed or actions taken against too selfish agents may improve the P2P society.