Peer-to-Peer File Sharing and Copyright (fwd)

[Eugene Leitl]

On Sat, 23 Mar 2002, Adam L. Beberg wrote:

> Remember the first rule of P2P: it's only good for things you dont want
> anyone to know you have, it's innanely inefficient and pain-in-the-arse for
> anything else.

This is only true if you want traffic remixing, low connectivity and node
prestige building. If you drop these requirements, you can optimize for
high performance, allowing you to saturate your pipe (whether cable modem,
or Ethernet) if you pull high-demand content.

Distribution is really the way to go.

> Check out http://download.cnet.com/downloads/0-10001-102-0-1.html
> The top 7 (this week) are all free, pirate tools, and very very popular.
> Most of the other top-50 are too actually.
>
> Never fear, the war will be over soon, the side that makes the content will
> win shortly. But you may have to think about that ;)

I do not see how you can effectively prevent the advent of wireless mesh
routed networks in urban areas at least. Also, though we're getting
traffic blocking and IP violation reporting at the ISP level, we haven't
had true P2P deployed widely yet.