Peer-to-peer - Social and Economic Impact

Social and Economic Impact

The concept of P2P is increasingly evolving to an expanded usage as the relational dynamic active in distributed networks, i.e., not just computer-to-computer, but human-to-human. Yochai Benkler has coined the term commons-based peer production to denote collaborative projects such as free and open source software and Wikipedia. Associated with peer production are the concepts of:

• peer governance (referring to the manner in which peer production projects are managed)
• peer property (referring to the new type of licenses which recognize individual authorship but not exclusive property rights, such as the GNU General Public License and the Creative Commons licenses)
• peer distribution (or the manner in which products, particularly peer-produced products, are distributed)

Some researchers have explored the benefits of enabling virtual communities to self-organize and introduce incentives for resource sharing and cooperation, arguing that the social aspect missing from today's P2P systems should be seen both as a goal and a means for self-organized virtual communities to be built and fostered. Ongoing research efforts for designing effective incentive mechanisms in P2P systems, based on principles from game theory are beginning to take on a more psychological and information-processing direction.