Microsoft will shortly unleash Avalanche, an attempt to improve on the popular filesharing app, BitTorrent. While BitTorrent is anathema to Hollywood studios and other copyright holders, Avalanche, which is being built in Microsoft Research, would include a DRM to block the unlicensed sharing of copyright material.

UPDATE: BitTorrent's Bram Cohen calls Avalanche "complete garbage." [Read[

Presumably what interests the folks in research, though, are some technical enhancements. Microsoft would add network coding to BitTorrent's swarming approach to large file downloads. In simplest terms, BitTorrent breaks content into blocks of data and does parallel requests for blocks from multiple servers. This greatly speeds downloads of large files.

Microsoft's improvements order the blocks that each machine has and creates a way for machines to communicate which blocks they have. According to Microsoft Research's paper:

Such encoding ensures that any piece uploaded by a given peer can be of use to any other peer. Peers do not need to find specific pieces in the system to complete, any encoded piece will suffice. This makes the system very robust as peers disconnect. Also, no peer becomes a bottleneck, since no block is more important than another. Finally, network bandwidth is considerably reduced since the same information does not travel multiple times over bottleneck links. And all this is achieved with zero-information of who has what, no knowledge of the network topology or available bandwidth, and negligible-overhead!

Very cool but its DRM not speed enhancements that will excite Hollywood as well as the digital frontier. Avalanche might actually legitimize P2P applications. Users uncomfortable with the shady side of the Net might be interested in using it if they didn't have to worry about love letters from the MPAA showing up in the mail.



And Hollywood would be happy to play ball with copyright-friendly companies like Microsoft, as they've proven with Apple. "Having a legitimate way to exchange intellectual property and respect copyright would be very welcome in the entertainment industry, and other industries too," movie industry lawyer Charlie Sims said.

But Microsoft needs to do DRM right. It would need to respect fair and free uses of copyright material, such as the ability to use purchased materials on more than one machine and to move materials to portable players.

Sounds like a release is imminent. I'll be happy to check it out.