What is peer-to-peer downloading?
Peer-to-peer technology allows people to download larger media files, such as video programs, onto their computers using a network of other individuals’ computers. Basically, an initial computer has the full media file. If that computer is in San Francisco, and a computer that wants the file is in New York, the New York computer has to pull the file across the country over the Internet. However, once the New York computer has some of the file, another computer in New York can begin to get parts of it from that machine, and the parts that are still missing from the San Francisco source. The more computers that have pieces of the file, the faster the distribution of it becomes, because the data has to travel less distance over the network that is the Internet. At the end of the process, once a computer has all the different chunks of the file that it is grabbing from multiple machines on the Internet, the peer-to-peer software puts it all together into a final, playable file. The most va
