Slashdot Mirror
EFF Seeks Examples Of Legit P2P Use
Electronic Frontier Foundation writes: "EFF is gathering real world examples of actual non-infringing uses of file sharing systems. We've heard about people using these systems to trade medical records, resumes, songs authorized by the author, etc. We need proof of these actions-- the kind of proof we could, if needed, introduce as evidence in court. Notes like "my friend Fred used Gnutella for his resume" are not helpful. Notes like "Intel is sponsoring P2P cancer research . Go to www.fool.intel.com or contact
cancerresearch2intel.com" or "I uploaded my songs and have received
positive messages from others who've listened to them" are helpful.
Points awarded for clarity, brevity and simplicity. Demerits applied for examples your grandmother wouldn't understand and your mom would find offensive. Please email examples to p2p@eff.org. Thanks for your help." It's a sad state of things when you've got to prove that something is good in order that it not be presumed harmful. "This hammer could be used for dangerous purposes -- can you prove there are good uses for it?" Sigh.
all deaths are fatal? That's a wonderful conclusion.
No joke. Murder rates are higher in America because of economic and social factors, not because of guns. Encouraging lawful gun ownership (eg, through concealed-carry permit legislation) decreases violent crime relative to a country's baseline (though not necessarily making it lower than another country's baseline), and laws which prohibit law-abiding gun owners from owning firearms increase violent crime relative to that baseline.
This is, largely, why violent crime rates increased in the UK and Australia after they adopted laws banning gun ownership recently, and why crime rates dropped in every American state which passed concealed carry permit laws. Criminals aren't so stupid that they don't realize that if guns are outlawed, they are less likely to run into a citizen with a gun, and can partake in violent crime rather boldly without fear of reprisal. They can also get away with relying on just a knife, or their bare hands, instead of a gun when they know they are likely to meet only unarmed resistance. Evidence supporting this position is cited in the University of Chicago law school report I linked in the thread above.
It ties right back in with the P2P issue, actually
At that point, it will be nearly as hard to detect P2P users as it would be to detect a homemade double-barrelled shotgun made of steel pipes and mousetrap parts in some anonymous citizen's garage.
-- Guges --
background
The major biological databases (EMBL, GenBank, Swissprot etc.) are repositories for sequence data, the information that describes the order of the DNA or proteins (depending on the database). This is collected and curated by a relatively small number of people compared to the size of these databases.
This information is relatively useless without annotation. Annotation is the description of the biological role of the sequence and which bits are important. Unfortunately annotation is difficult and time consuming for people who are non experts to maintain. THis means that many of the entries in the databases are either poorly annotated (poor), have out of date annotation (poor) or blatently incorrect annotation (really bad).
A system of P2P sharing of annotation data has been devised where an expert working on gene Xyz can make available his own annotations without having to burden the overworked people at GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ to make updates to the central database. Interested parties can access this data in a P2P manner (ie a query on 'what does anyone know about Xyz').
One of the main protagonists of DAS (Distributed Annotation System) is Lincoln Stein at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (yes, of CGI.pm fame). It will also be presented at the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference in July this year (where I hope to find out a lot more about it too..)
This sounds like a perfect example of productive P2P.Have a look at http://stein.cshl.org/das/ for more information. I know that at least one of the authors on the paper referenced has been guilty of reading Slashdot in the past so maybe he would comment.
Gee, what about that thing called The World Wide Web? Anyone with a connection to the Internet can either put up a server, or browse with a browser.
It is the same thing as Napster, or Gnutella,etc... Centralized server holds the addresses of the hosts (DNS...), a person runs a server app (just because Gnutella/Napster/etc have a combined server/browser doesn't make a big difference), and makes a list of his/her files to share available (ie, web server with a list of files, with or without an index.html.). You use a search engine to find the files you want (Nap et al. simply have that built in, again).
THE INTERNET IS PEER 2 PEER in it's very design.
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
I've covered all this in the letter. If they want me to come say it or a summary of it in person, and can get me there, I will go. I consider nothing more important than helping EFF, at this point, in whatever way I can. And I'm a damned good cold-reader/speaker
Even ignoring for the moment the distinct possibility that the methods and assumptions used in the study are flawed, which I believe they are, you seem to have disregarded the remainder of the article after coming across the statement that you cite. It goes on to say:
But even this number is of precarious significance, for it embodies the dubious assumption that comparing "body counts" is a meaningful way to report the usefulness of firearms.
As reported by Gary Kleck's study, the vast majority of defensive uses of guns do not result in injury. Guns are quite effective at deterring crime. Criminals don't like targets that can defend themselves and possibly kill them. Additionally, as the article says:
One does not measure the effectiveness of a police department, for example, by comparing the number of officers and criminals killed over some time period. Rather, one asks what effect the police have had on the rate of crime. Similarly, one should not compare the number of burglars or other intruders and civilians killed by domestic firearms, but rather ask how many burglars or other intruders were driven away or deterred by the firearm.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Statistical statements such as "a gun is 6 times more likely to kill a resident of the household than an intruder" can also be quite misleading. How likely is it that you will kill an intruder with the gun? 10%? 0.01%? It makes a difference. Top that off with the fact that the statistics are highly suspect themselves and it becomes meaningless. The study seemed to be deliberately misleading. I've been trying to find the actual paper so I can read the whole thing, but haven't hand any luck so far. I've only found pieces of it, and they seemed misleading.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
P2P is just a fancy name for a file sharing method, and sharing files is not illegal. So I don't see the connection between the original case, and your analogue.
Analogues almost always muddy the debate, people start arguing the analogue instead of the original point.
If you had said "if airplanes had got a reputation for being primarily used for smuggling, and you wanted to prove they were useful for legal purposes, would you find examples of using airplanes for legal purposes?", the analogue would be almost one-to-one with the original scenario. However, like the original scenario, the answer would be obvious. If you want to demonstrate that a technology is useful for legal purposes, an obvious method is to find examples of such uses.
I share my recently created or downloaded packages for Debian GNU/Linux on gnutellanet. Redistribution is always authorized by the copyright proprietor. I'm also working on an enhancement for apt that will enable it to download packages from gnutellanet and share recently downloaded packages. (I'm also carefully following developments in Debian that will eventually lead to cryptographic signatures on packages in order to reduce the risk of a rogue package being inadvertantly installed).
Now what does this have to do with P2P and IP laws?
Yes, sometimes new technologies replace old technologies. But the airlines became successful by convincing passengers to travel with them, not by swooping down picking up the rail cars and forcing them to fly.
If you were deathly afraid of flying, wouldn't you rather have a choice?
"Download redhat? Make it available to someone else!" The problem is that all p2p networks to date have been built on marginally legal materials. We need to change that. A p2p enabled browser might be a very good start.
--
-- Slashdot sucks.
No need for going to the library or paying outragous subscription fees for journals.
The May issue of CACM has several articles about the need to establish free digital libraries of scientific papers.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
It's hard to argue airplanes are inherently dangerous to people
I think it would be really easy to argue, actually. Look up the accident statistics yourself. It's still safer than driving... but would we have known that (or believed it) before public air travel became popular?
But some of us feel that all this is irrelevant, that you shouldn't need to be sponsored by a noble cause (TM) to write or use a computer program!
Repeat after me: "My life is my own. I do not need to justify my life to others." You especially don't need to dredge up something like cancer research to justify the existance of an entire class of computer programs to, of all plaintiffs, the entertainment industry!!!
The EduCommons project at Utah State University is comprised maily of an educational P2P application that allows teachers, students, and researchers to share syllabi, lecture notes, research instruments, and data sets they already have laying around their machine directly with each other. After securing some funding from the University itself to get the project going, the project team is expecting to hear regarding two seperate NSF grants within the next month or so.
This is just the type of legitimate app you are looking for. NSF spends millions each year on the development of collections of digital educational resources through its NSDL initiative, when many of those resources already exist on Joe Professor's computer in Nebraska...
This spring I spent most of my Internet2 talk time in front of university NOC folks saying "Sure, you're planning ways to shut down Napster now, but in 6 months we're going to have a P2P app directly in line with your organization's mission that you won't be able to just 'turn off'. You'll actually have to deal with it".
By the way, the project is all open source, and we're still looking for client/peer programmers on the Linux and Win32 side. =) EduCommons project.
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meta4
dw2-dont-spam-me-@opencontent.org
http://davidwiley.com/
"This hammer could be used for dangerous purposes -- can you prove there are good uses for it?"
Actually the current state of things, is...
"This hammer has been used for all manner of illegal purposes -- can you provide one legal example of how it has been used?"
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
I will immediately sell my loft, my airplane, and most of the rest of my worldly possessions and emigrate from this country (USA).
I will then, at my new location, immediately set up a freenet node for those unfortunate enough to remain within the borders of this once-free land.
Perhaps political asylum in Canada would be worth getting, assuming they still have the kind of backbone they once had during the Vietnam era.
In any event, I will cease contributing to the economy and power of a nation which goes down this path. Indeed, I'm on the verge of doing so already, with all the freedoms they have stripped from us. I'm not advocating a mass exodus of intelligent IT people (although the idea has a certain appeal -- do you suppose a country run by idiots would notice the brain drain and force us to stay, at the point of a government gun?), but voting with one's feet is a very legitimate action, one which, in a generation or two, might even effect the kind of change made virtually impossible by our entrenched and corrupt political apparatus.
--FreeUser, fondly remembering living in Europe, which even twelve years ago was more free than the less-draconian-than-today United States of the time...
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The idea is a P2P client that monitors a host, and it has a list of other hosts to gather information on. It transmits the data over a P2P network gathering data on all machines (latency times, services up, etc) and then each machine can report a failure on a node to email or pager.
This seems to be a sound idea and a good idea for a network monitor tool. And, as it is stated here if this were the case it seems a plugin to an existing P2P architecture system is all thats necessary, thus making a beneficial legal P2P network.
Or.. Im just clueless which is entirely possible.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
OJ wasn't guilty, but he was liable.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Hmm... so let me get this straight: most people who have telephones in their homes, have them in order to get their hands on copyrighted material without paying for it?
Perhaps you haven't thought about what p2p really is.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
You and the guy above have completely opposing arguments, how can you both be insightful. One of you has to be wrong
What does being insightful have to do with right and wrong?
Ayn Rand and Karl Marx were both insightful about a great many things (and diametrically opposed to each other). Neither is 100% correct, but they both bring insight to the discussion of economics and the relation to society...
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I'm guessing this submission was just a moronic employee at EFF who overheard something in the hallways and decided "hey - I bet /. would be great for this!"
To use the words of the submission, "demerits applied" for most useless information request from an organization that should know better.
Dude, your Athlon peecee running Linux is in absolutely no way, whatsoever, a peer of the cluster of 64-way UltraEnterprise 10K servers which power eBay.
/dev/null ? Funny I can see ebay then.
So, you think that ebays server dumps its packets right into
I think you've misunderstood what a 'peer' actually is on the internet.
--
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
The entire Internet is built around the Peer-to-Peer principble. Of course, firewalls & NAT-devices break this principle all the time - but basically - Internet _is_ a peer-to-peer network.
Some peers are called 'servers' since they contain more data and serve more people than others. Still, they are just peers.
But, to get real examples. IRC-Botnets - the bots are connected to eachother, and talk to eachother. They maintain stability on IRC channels, or perform other functions.
Another example, the good old fashioned 'talk' program is a nice peer-to-peer thingomajig.
--
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
I question how it is possible for anyone to come up with any definition of "point to point file sharing" that will allow microsoft.com to send files to users and yet not allow me to run gnutella.
A Server is a Point on the Network. No more, no less. There is NO technical difference between me running Apache and www.google.com running Apache. They just have more computers to run it, and a larger bandwidth to run it on.
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
My point is, given this hypothetical situation, the railroad companies would most certainly try to pass laws restricting air travel.
;) so railroads still have a niche.
They CERTAINLY had the resources. I'm not sure the political climate would have allowed legislative manipulation on that level (like today).
They would also have tried very hard to gain mindshare by arguing that air travel would ruin their business, thereby threatening the US economy.
Unfortunately for them, there was NO PRIOR restrictions on air travel, since it was never percieved as a threat.
Fortunatly for them, however, air transport can be expensive (especially for very heavy things
P2P, however, has always been basically illegal (in a capitalistic structure) from the BIRTH of ideas in the form of patents and copyright laws. What kept it going was that the widespread transfer of large chunks of information was relatively expensive/hard and restricted to publishers of books and newspapers.
Once the technological/cost barrier had fallen, everybody started scrambling to keep the house of cards from completely collapsing.
It can't be stopped now - and unlike heavfy freight for railroads, I doubt there is a sizable niche for the retail information business model.
I am interested to read what examples can be provided for positive usage of P2P, but I'm afraid that like guns, it will be shown that overwhelmingly P2P is used to flout the law and that our society is better without it.
It will be shown that P2P is used to flout several stupid and shortsighted laws, and that our society is better without said laws.
.. and you wanted to prove airplanes were useful, would you find ways to use the airplane on the ground?
I think not.
P2P blows the top off of what the conventional wisdom of intellectual property says, and THAT is why there is a debate to begin with.
By this argument, napster isn't p2p: both users log in to a server, after which they are connected to each other. Or they connect to their ISP's before connecting to each other.
The telephone is a prime example: both peers (phones) send data and receive data through a network, directly to each other. The data just happens to be sound. It's an example that I had not thought about. It's the first time I actually feel narrow minded. I (we) should think broader than just computer(networks).
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the pun is mightier than the sword
For a long time now we've been hearing of this supposed information economy, for over twenty years in fact. In order to sell something you've got to be able to control it to the extent that people who aren't willing to pay you for it don't get access to it. P2P sharing of information undermines this.
I personally don't have a problem with this, but only because I believe that freedom of information is more important in the scheme of things thatn whether someone gets paid for that information. I have no problem with the idea that someone should get paid if they produce and distribute something.
The problem is that when you try to base an economy off this when the thing being produced is information, you end up with things being controlled that have no business being controlled, such as the distribution of information on what laws have been passed or enacted, which was in fact covered in a recent slashdot article.
The DMCA is the perfect example of the types of abuses you can expect from an information based economy.
Freedom of information is necessary for freedom of expression because freedom of expression is itself dependent upon freedom of thought. Freedom of thought is in turn once again dependent upon freedom of information because information control is thought control.
Here in the US we are very sensitive to the right that we all have to freedom of expression. But for whatever reason we are not so sensitive to the right upon which it depends, freedom of thought. How can someone truly speak their mind when their ideas are controlled by another?
This is why P2P is an important social good. It allows and encourages the unregulated exchange of ideas and information, which in turn promotes and helps ensure a well informed public, which is something that democracy is itself dependent upon.
It has often been said that the first amendment makes all others possible. I'd argue that the first and the second amendment make all others possible, but for either of them to actually be there and exist, you must have freedom of information.
Lee Reynolds
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
One thing that I think is totally lost in most P2P networks is the potential benefit to amature photographers like myself. When I'm connected to gnutella, which I am fairly often, I offer up a selection (currently 6) of my own photographs including some nature shots and some people (including a very strange self-portrait). Of course, you would have trouble finding these right now, amid the piles of porn which dominate the visual offerings on gnutella, which I find somewhat distressing.
The DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine) standard is one implementation of the P2P that needs to be looked at. the principle behind the communication according to the DICOM standard is that EVERY "Station" is both a client and a server. you have of course dedicated storage station such as PACS (Picture Archiving System) for obvious reasons [the Files are quite large]. This standard is used and developed by people all over the world). You can find one open source implementation of the DICOM standard here (OFFIS) and other DICOM ressourses here Any How, this is only one example and I'm sure people can find better one.
It's a sad state of things when you've got to prove that something is good in order that it not be presumed harmful. "This hammer could be used for dangerous purposes -- can you prove there are good uses for it?" Sigh.
Well, here's the poop. Napster, the primary critter defendant in these matters, isn't itself copying any content, it is merely indexing p2p sources. We all get that. The Copyright law distinguishes between Direct copyright infringement (you did the copying) and Indirect infringement (you take the hit for someone else's copying).
Indirect infringement takes the form of contributory or vicarious infringement. To be liable for indirect infringement, a plaintiff must be able to prove not only that the third party infringed, which requires every element, but some other stuff as well, including actual knowledge of the third party's infringement.
One defense to infringement (and this is why VCR and copying machine manufacturers don't spend much time in court these days) is that the technology aiding the infringement is capable of a substantial noninfringing use.
Plaintiffs in these cases are suggesting that there may be no substantial noninfringing uses for p2p, and EFF would like to rebut that.
There are plenty of "good" reasons to use distributed peer-to-peer file sharing. Personally, I think that these systems would make a good replacement for servers like astro-ph, once someone gets around to adding support for searching for keywords in parts of files besides filenames. (As it stands, including all of the relevant keywords in the filename leads to unreasonably long filenames.) People who want to distribute their own music, essays, or video productions could benefit similarly. These are all legal activities that we have every right to engage in, but the intellectual property industry will argue that those concerns are inconsequential next to the menace of "piracy". They will argue that I should give up my right to use my computer equipment in a perfectly legal manner because somebody else might use the same software to perform some illegal activity, and my activity just isn't important enough to justify that risk. Of course, that's easy for them to say, since they aren't being asked to give up anything.
By making these arguments, media companies are in effect saying that nobody but themselves has anything worthwhile to say, and therefore if anyone other than themselves is saying something that people are listening to, then that something must have been stolen from the purveyors of intellectual property. This sort of reasoning is an anathema to free speech, and we must resist it now, before it becomes entrenched in the form of legislation.
-rpl
If you guys at the EFF fuck up and the judge says "point to point file sharing is illegal" I'm going to be very very pissed. Outlawing a technology is just outrageous.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Or you know, you could take a stand and say "hey, if he wants to do that let the copyright holder sue him, I aint the RIAA's whipping boy". You service providers who dilute due process disgust me.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I host my Project Guttenburg E-Books on Gnutella as well as many shareware and freeware games spanning all the way back to the early 1980s. To my knowledge I do not have one single copyright violation in my shared folder.
What is so special about that, why all the fuzz? Even the notion of defending P2P makes me sick and is absurd. The Internet is built on (mostly) the TCP protoco, which allows for any node to connect to any other node directly. The Internet *is* P2P and has been so from the beginning.
It is normal to telnet from machine A to machine B, and then telnet back from B to A. It is normal to act both as an ftp client and server, in fact before the web became popular, in the old days, almost any connected node to the Internet acted both as client and as server.
Why is this "evidence" needed? People trying to forbid P2P are trying to forbid Internet, or at least trying to fundamentally change its netowork protocol (which is impossible).
Only ISP's could block incoming connections, thus making "P2P" (how I hate that word, describing something that has been around for ages as if it were something new) impossible. Not many of them do (luckily), only having no fixed IP address makes acting as a server a bit more complicated, but things like dyndns get around that.
One might imagine a future where anyone with a dynamic IP address (hard to trace) is prohibited by the state to have incoming connections. That is a nightmare but I don't think such a draconic law is very probably, and it would be very hard to enforce too.
The mass digitization of our heritage needs a driver, and it's not going to happen if we're so paranoid about copyright that we don't act now, while the source materials are still available.
The RIAA had a GOOD THING in Napster, then they fucked themselves (and us) by getting greedy, being penny wise, and pound foolish to a degree which just pisses me off every single time I think about it.
We need to revisit the concepts of copyright and cut DOWN the time frame to 10 years, no more. We need to cut down the patent to 7 years. It's obvious that you shouldn't be able to patent software or business methods (which are all ideas for using existing systems, not improving a machine.)
This topic ALWAYS gets my blood boiling. /FLAME
--Mike--
Which seems to be the most trivial and common example. Just about any company is using some kind of sharing protocols. While larger companies use some sort of centralized (or department-wide) file servers, the smaller outfits often resort to peer-to-peer sharing of their Windows disks. Granted, they use SMB for the purpose, not Napster, but used this way, SMB is peer-to-peer too.
Say no to software patents.
To distribute Linux releases, you'd probably want to modify the mechanism somewhat - Nx600MB is a large chunk of data to need to transmit reliably, compared to the reliability of modems or servers. (Linux servers *are* much more reliable than Windows, but the reason you're distributing a new Linux release is so people can shut their systems down while they install new software on them.) So you'd need to distribute the thing as some collection of smaller packages, plus the software's critical enough that you'd need a centrally distributed digital signature mechanism (which is primarily just another file to ship along with the rest of the distro, except that everybody would probably want to verify the file centrally.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Aren't copyright laws loosened with regards to educational material?
They're not loosened... it's the same law. What you're referring to is the notion of 'fair use', which has been enshrined in the very same copyright laws that say it is illegal to do the converse: to make full copies for your own profit (distribution), or to make partial copies passing it off as your own work (plagiarism). This is not just for educational use, but that's one large area of concern here.
[
P2P is not centralised, this is different from almost all comercial models of selling content.
Centralised content distribution lends itself to censorship and control.
P2P ensures free speech. It is the modern equivelant of word of mouth.
In this climate of mass-consumerisim and mass-media word of mouth is something that the next generation is mostly ignorant of.
a valid example of P2P is freenet. Freedom of speech is legitimate. Some things need to be said.
This is my sig, exciting huh!
Piper: http://bioinformatics.org/piper/
Piper is a peer-to-peer (P2P) distributed workflow system. It is an independent, GNU-based project which brings the power and flexibility of the GNU/UNIX command-line interface (CLI) to the graphical user interface (GUI) and Internet-distributed computing.
Networks, programs, files, widgets, and so on, can be Internet-distributed components represented in a GUI as the nodes of a flow chart. The user can join nodes via lines that depict links for data flow, procedural steps, relationships, and so forth.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Since there really ARE NO legal uses of P2P today, we should ban all peers. Quick! Before someone invents something legal, companies are losing money! In fact, for the good of all, I will volunteer right now. It was fun while it lasted, but they found us out. Bye for ever Internet. *waves to cyberspace sadly, tears flowing down his cheeks*
Btw, what happened to `until proven guilty'?
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
I agree. As I read the meta-post, It occured to me that this is how usenet started, Peer2Peer message exchange for academics and the first real hackers (probably best to call then Computer Scientists/Researchers in any legal brief). Usenet messages are propergated to/from peers only, between the various news groups, and certainly initial was only done on demand (subscription). They are stored as seperate files, seems to fit the criteria specified.
Indeed in many ways this is not dissimilar to the relationship between Telco-Carriers.
...but yes, it seems to me a hammer is often used for such marginally legal activities as house construction, wall hangings, beating one's own thumb senseless, and, of course, bludgeoning Slashdot editors.
On a slightly more serious note, a hammer (and a knife, and yes, even a gun) all have very obvious positive uses that everyone, even the EFF's grandmother, can understand. P2P does have good uses, but nearly ninety five percent of everyone I know uses it exclusively to break the law. I mean, really -- who honestly uses Gnutella for their resume? People use email for file sharing on a low-quantity bases; by their very nature, Napster and Gnutella are blobs of 'HERE LOOKIT WHAT I GOT TAKE IT ALL' that, while very convenient and even amazing, are, in fact, against the law.
I'm not arguing that the law is right, that the current form of RIAA music publication is a good one -- merely observing that Gnutella and Napster, as the largest 'public' examples of P2P file sharing, are infamous for their illegal uses, so yes, you do have to stop and ask 'does anyone actually use this thing and not break the law.' It is, using your analogy, closer to having to ask if anyone uses an Uzi for something good, rather than a hammer -- at least for the public.
As long as we trade .mp3, .mpg and .avi on these services, they're "illegal" in the sense of the media/lawyers. We need to start sharing .medicalresearch, .picturesofmomanddad and .myfreecontributiontohelpdefeatworldhunger instead!
it's in my head
"Can you give me an example where two people, treated equally under law, should be permitted to communicate with each other freely and equally?"
Isn't that really what they're asking? Personally, I think it's the wrong question, because the question inherently assumes that you are NOT generally free, with minor restrictions for the betterment of society.
And that's really what laws are supposed to be FOR in a free society - to say "you are free to do absolutely anything that you want, except for these few items so that everybody else can continue doing what they want and all are happy."
To answer the question - isn't a TELEPHONE P2P? It just uses a different network.
Morning rant concludes...
sig fault
In terms of the FCC liking P2P, the fact that one of the Four Pillars (and, frankly, the Good Witch) is willing to back the idea ought to stand as excellent character evidence, in my opinion.
IP is just rude.
Is there any torture so subl
I already responded to EFF with this. The data is public domain (paid for by your taxes). People usually have Digital Raster Graphic maps for their area but not others. Sharing would be a good way to make all the US available. There is a naming convention, and a standard file format (GeoTIFF).
you have got to be kidding. file sharing is the greatest thing since sliced bread and floating soap. using it takes advantage of the massive connectivity now available without needing to host your crap on somebody else server's, effectively increasing the scale and ability of any user to disseminate their ideas and knowledge. it ensures that nobody need be held hostage to material and resources they might not have access to or want to compromise them with.
its the new USENET, only without the god-like whimsy of sysadmnins. I have a great deal of trouble beleiving you can see "no honestly persuasive case for" a system of file sharing that allows unfettered access to just about anything anyone might care to make available, without constraint and without fear of arbitrary caprice, TOS and the like.
what could be better? what could be more effective, more populist, more empowering, on the internet?
the IP issue seems to be a vanishingly small issue in the face of those benefits. let the poperty holders look to their wallets, and not to our hands- it has ben ever thus.
People pooh-pooh the idea of the "music community" that Napster(tm) is trying to put forward, but when the music isn't being "stolen" (can music be stolen? or is it always given... but that's for a whole different discussion), meaning that it is freely given, as many electronic musicians are doing these days to promote themselves, the networks really do turn into a community.
I can't count the number of times I've had someone downloading a track from me on napster (or opennap, or what have you) where we've started up a conversation about the track and recommended stuff to each other. Many of the times the person would then point me to some of his own music or sets that were also on Napster. I've found a lot of good music this way, and I'd be really miffed to miss out on that opportunity to find new music.
Another use that I've only touched on here is that of DJs trading their sets on P2P systems. Almost every DJ I know who isn't already a superstar wants more exposure, and p2p networks are great for that.
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
Microsoft has stated on numerous occasions that SMB on Win9x (and NT) is a peer-to-peer based system when the machine is not part of a Windows NT domain.
SMB on windows is used as both a server and client. SMB is used to share files among linux systems and windows computers.
SMB is indeed a peer-to-peer system of sharing legitimate data. Many business offices, schools, and government use SMB to share files. Why don't we use RIAA as a good example of someone using peer-to-peer to share their MS Word documents about the trial on their lan?
:)
Ever need an online dictionary?
I'd like a list of small bands that pass out full mp3 tracks so you can here there works. So far, I found this awesome artist (listening to his mp3s made me buy his CD), John Lardieri and apparently this artist, Down to Zero, will be putting their MP3s out. Anyone else contribute to this list?
That you could use it to distribute fan missions for various FPS games, which tend to be huge. It was specifically for the Thief Fan Mission Archive, which was distraught at the time. Unfortunately, this never actually happened.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
What needs to be implimented follows:
1) MD5/CRC checks so that a file that has the same name/size but has different contents is not used as a mirror.
2) Searching for file mirrors based on he MD5/CRC instead of the name
3) Segmented downloading of one file from multiple servers. This allows you to dowload at your maximum speed, while using only a portion of the bandwidth from any one-host. (currently implimented in 'getright' downloader)
4) Passive Gnutella. Gnutella should download a list of all available files from your connected hosts, along with the lists they have collected. Your node sends a request every few minutes to verify the CRC/MD5 of the list is still the same. If it isn't, you download the new list and pass it on. Now, you are searching a local database of files and hosts that is up-to-date. You can set the interval it checks the host's filelist so that modem users can still participate (404 errors will be slightly more common on slow connections tho, but with auto mirror calculation, this shouldn't be a problem)
5) A automated function that checks the project's web site for the latest MD5/CRC then downloads any new versions, then you have the most recent version of your favorite project and are always an up-to-date mirror. The user can of course choose which projects/files to mirror automatically, and since the web site distributes the MD5/CRC of the files the file is known to be the true file.
Of course, once this happens, the MPAA will go after any sites with the MD5 sums/CRCs of DVDs or MP3s.
In the future, the download links you click will look like: "gnutella://edf5c7822381acfb44c094d5161b37da WordPerfect8.tar.gz"
____________________________________________
I don't respond to flames, but any suggestions/critizms are appreciated. It would be amazing to get something like this working, and it's just a few (fairly extreme) extensions to the current Gnutella technology.
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Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
As far as anonymity, Gnutella is just as anonymous as FreeNet. I've read the papers, I've used the program, etc. What you download on FreeNet is very clearly recorded in ISP and router logs. The only claim to anonymity a FreeNet user has is the claim that it was the automatic caching feature which downloaded the file and shared it (the author clearly states this on the web page). Meanwhile, with Gnutella you can claim you just accidentally downloaded it (I searched for Adobe and downloaded the resulting list, how was I to know Photoshop6 was in there) and Gnutella automatically shares files that you've downloaded.
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Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
That's the point, FreeNet doesn't give you any more privacy than Gnutella.
Furthermore, you must realize that your orginal post suggested an idea (requesting files by their hash in order to verify the contents of the file) that has been in Freenet for a long time, and then you flamed Freenet for being behind in development. Um, yeah.
I wholly admited that FreeNet has one or two features that Gnutella doesn't, but FreeNet is not functional as Gnutella is, and even when it is finished, there's very little reason to use FreeNet over Gnutella.
There's no conspiracy, but it's always nice to know you've been picking battles all across the internet on behalf of FreeNet. With or without any evidence.
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Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
We're doing this in Freenet. Check out http://eof.sourceforge.net/APT/index.html.
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Not a typewriter
In Freenet, this is solved by what we call a "subspace" (which goes under the name of "SVK Subspace Key", or "SSK", an SVK being a public/private keypair). You can only post to a subspace if you have the private encryption key. To request from it, you need the public encryption key. So, you just need to insert under "SSK@/newsTellaDDMMYY.mp3" and no one can hijack it (provided you keep the private key private).
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Not a typewriter
I'm doing something similar to Freenet, although we didn't require any new code to get apt-get to work. See http://eof.sourceforge.net/APT/index.html.
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Not a typewriter
It seems to me that there is no honestly persuasive case for P2P. Sure, advocates will be able to dig up some supposed example of legitimate use, but if we are honest, we the reason people really like P2P is that it allows them to get their hands on copyright material without paying for it.
Of course the P2P advocates will claim that P2P can be used to distribute legitimate material. While this is true, it is not persuasive: why bother with P2P if you material is legitimate - why not simple upload your stuff one of the free web space providers, then your material available 24/7 without sucking up your machines clock-cycles or bandwidth.
I don't think that the RIAA would go after M$.
Fight Spammers!
At best it will be a collection of ideas on how P2P could be used, which is nice, but isn't the idea to get something more concrete than that?
My mom is not a Karma whore!
...imagine when the first asshole decides to post his own newsTellaDDMMYY.mp3 a day before yours. As there's no central control people can do that, you know.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Aimster licenses their software to several multinationals.
It is commonly used to exchange engineering documents through a multi-platform enterprise.
Check the webpage for details.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Here's a question than, AC:
How do you defend against an enemy living within your borders when that enemy has bombs, guns, and other firearms, and is desparate enough to resort to stones?
How do you defend against this enemy when the enemy has no clear plan other than chaos? no strategy, no easily identifiable clothed army to battle against?
Make no mistake, this is a war, and the enemy is recruiting their children for pawns. The enemy is willing to order their soldiers to commit suicide.
Israel is 200% larger than when it was recognized in 1948? Geez, I know they gave the Sinai desert to Egypt, effectively halving the country. What information do you have that says otherwise?
Arab refugees in Israel began identifying themselves as part of a Palestinian people in 1967, two decades after the establishment of the
modern State of Israel.
Arab and Jewish Refugees In 1948 the Arab refugees were encouraged to leave Israel by Arab leaders promising to purge the land of Jews. Sixty-eight percent left without ever seeing an Israeli soldier.
The Jewish refugees were forced to flee from Arab lands due to Arab brutality, persecution and pogroms.
The number of Arab refugees who left Israel in 1948 is estimated to be around 630,000. The number of Jewish refugees from Arab lands is
estimated to be the same.
Arab refugees were INTENTIONALLY not absorbed or integrated into the Arab lands to which they fled, despite the vast Arab territory. Out
of the 100,000,000 refugees since World War II, theirs is the only refugee group in the world that has never been absorbed or integrated into their own peoples' lands. Jewish refugees were completely absorbed into Israel, a country
no larger than the state of New Jersey.
The Arab - Israeli Conflict; The Arabs are represented by eight separate nations, not including the Palestinians. There is only one
Jewish nation. The Arab nations initiated all five wars and lost.
Israel defended itself each time and won.
The PLO's Charter still calls for the destruction of the state of Israel. Israel has given the Palestinians most of the West Bank land, autonomy under the Palestinian Authority, and has supplied them with weapons.
The notion that Israel should even supply the enemy with weapons is ridiculous and it's still not enough to satisfy your ill-informed mind.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
The telephone.
Each phone both sends and receives data.
Wow - the US is spinning in a sea of shitte. Is P2P on trial now...?
This is what I did...
1. I composed and recorded spoken poems, with a microphone, on my PC.
2. I titled and clearly labelled these files as original poetry.
3. I placed these files into my Napster shared directory and ran Napster.
4. Now this is the really cool part. I waited and watched and watched and waited, and sure enough, people began to download my poetry. This is FANTASTIC! The world needs more poetry! And there are clearly enough people interested in listening. Knowing that the P2P file sharing will get my poems heard, I'm inspired me to write more poetry! This is great. PC microphones suitable for voice recording can be purchased for less than $10, so I hope more people start sharing their thoughts and voices on the internet. People want to hear it!
Personally I find the term "P2P filesharing" to be a bit of semantic nonsense. It is "filesharing"-- plain and simple. The only thing P2P implies is that the peers are roughly the same type of beast. But there is precious little that distinguishes peer-to-peer from client-server, except that the software in P2P tends to support both accepting and requesting connections-- that is, the client and server software are the same application.
BFD, I say. It's a small technical issue that has no legal bearing on the matter of "filesharing" itself. So unless you want to state that FTP, HTTP, DCC, and CD-ROM methods of filesharing show "precious little evidence... [of] being put to good use so far", then you really are allowing the debate to get steered off-track.
I do not have a signature
What about the "psycho ex-girlfriend" guy. If I recall correctly, he couldn't afford to keep up with the demand on his web site, but you could find all the messages up on napster. Voila, instant legal distribution machine.
Unfortunately this isn't the most wholesome example, but it does demonstrate something. If the public domain weren't so impoverished, it's not hard to imagine that the "heavenly jukebox" we all want wouldn't be centrally located, but instead would be a distributed network like freenet. Why? Because the RIAA may be right that there wouldn't be the same incentive to throw millions and billions into distribution and marketing if copyright weren't such a racket. So no one wants to take on the task on their own? We'll distribute the processing/storage. This is where their view of IP breaks down, that somehow their extreme view of copyright is the only thing standing between us and a musicless society. What nonsense.
Bryguy
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
The now-infamous "Call #31" has been removed from from the voicemails page. A new, edited version of the call should be released soon. Check Napster for the old version.
This is from the front page of psychoexgirlfriend.com. I imagine the guy had issues with his webmaster where they felt uncomfortable with some of the content. It's not baseball and apple pie or anything, but it certainly doesn't seem to be an IP violation.
Bryguy
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
So, I have this idea, and I think it's pretty good. If I had the time, I'd do it myself, but maybe someone else will pick it up and run with it.
Here goes. What does p2p get you? Free distribution. What do you lose? Centralized control. So the materials best suited for distribution over a p2p network are 1. things you want as widely disseminated as possible and 2. things that don't have to be constantly updated and revised.
My idea, basically, is to use napster/gnutella as a publishing medium for original content that is specifically designed for p2p. If this works, you can distribute a reasonably large file over a very large network in a very short period of time, and here's the kicker- if your stuff gets popular, you don't have to pay out big bucks for akamai and better server hardware.
So what kind of content would fly? I think sketch comedy that gets updated daily would be ok, or better yet, a comedic news program. I love reading Suck.com on my palm pilot on the train every morning, I wish someone would do a Not Necessarily the News style 5-10minute news bit every morning and distribute it over napster/gnutella with a predictable filename (maybe newsTellaDDMMYY.mp3 or something like that). Eventually you could get sponsors and integrate little ads into your content, or maybe you'd spark a phenomenon and some radio network would pick you up or something, or maybe even just sell archives of your work on cdrom or something. But it seems like the way to really capitalize on the medium is to take advantage of the fact that a public media distribution network has been made available to you. It's not the web, it's not tv, and promoting your stuff i nthis media doesn't work the same way it does in these other media. If you publicise the fact that you're doing it and update consistently and often, and actually produce some funny/interesting content, I think you'd be onto something really big. Let me know how it goes if you try it.
Bryguy
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Yes, the Internet is a network of machines connecting directly to other machines (peer-to-peer network topology), but most applications of the network are not peer-to-peer. That's the point.
The only real, widespread, mainstream application of peer-to-peer filesharing systems seems to be piracy of intellectual property. 'talk' isn't going to convince anyone otherwise.
In fact, I, er, use it to maintain all my network installations. Yeah, that's the ticket... it has saved me mucho time and frustration.
Aren't copyright laws loosened with regards to educational material? I seem to remember being able to use copyrighted images for a web report in one of my classes, provided I give photo credits and not charge anything. Is that simply a moral issue, or would pretty much anything downloaded for the sole purpose of educating others / yourself be legit?
:-P
And before it even starts, I'm NOT talking about "illegal Metallica MP3s playing in the background helps me study!"
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i saved a lot of money due to using Napster, and with the money I didn't spend on cds, I was able to buy a hit afacid, which after tripping, increased my spirituality...therefore P2P Sharing is good for religion too
How about examples like Internet telephony and video telephony? For that matter what about FTP and aptget? Or, one that we all know and love... Windows Update. There are also many networked games that are P2P.
Don't let THEM define the term P2P. P2P is anything in which two or more network peers communicated with each other as peers. It isn't just file sharing.
StoneWolf
When debating gun laws, gun advocates are often asked to supply examples of legitimate usage. The intuition, I suppose, is that the harm caused by guns is obvious; what needs debated is if any good can come from them.
How does this relate to P2P? Well, it is obvious to anyone who looks that such applications are used to pirate immense amounts of protected material. This doesn't need to be debated. However, a case does need to be made for allowing such applications to exist at all. If the only examples of usage truly are illegal and harmful, then defending P2P becomes untenable.
I am interested to read what examples can be provided for positive usage of P2P, but I'm afraid that like guns, it will be shown that overwhelmingly P2P is used to flout the law and that our society is better without it.
The truth shall set you free.
I notice a lot of people here saying "just look at the Internet as a whole...". This is fine and all, but still doesn't provide the clear example of so-called 'legit' usage. So here is a few that I've been exposed to.
I ran a small ISP that offered coverage to most of our state. We had three offices, which for simplicity, were located in roughly a triangular pattern across the state (physically separated by several hundred miles). Each office had it's own local technical support for its immeadiate area. However, all three needed to collaborate together to solve common technical problems (especially since two of the offices had overlapping dial-in nodes). Our solution was to use ICQ for everyone in all the offices. Once everyone was in for the day and logged on, everyone had instant access to chat with anyone else (you knew when someone was in, out to lunch or home sick). After implementing that our productivity increased approximately 40% and call time decreased accordingly. Phone support was now able to work the problem out with the customer and the rest of his peers around the state at the same time (often with the customer oblivious to this). Meetings between all the technicians were held through a simulataneous chat session (ICQ has simple IRC interface for chat), just like having a meeting in one room, everyone had a chance to speak at those meetings.
Being a P2P connection, technicians were able to use the file sharing abilities of ICQ to send drivers and other useful files quickly between each other when needed (it was able to go directly to the tech who needed it at the time). We even provided some techs with a public ICQ name and broadcast those to our users. That way, they provided online question support to online users using ICQ as well (those customer had other questions than "I cant get online..").
I think this is a very powerful use of P2P-like technology. In fact I remember about a year or two ago several tech-mags having articles about using these programs in that way (we had already been that way for a year). I think some of the new P2P programs might be written for the same useage, but wont rely on a central ICQ-type server. Give a particular company their own server and run the clients within their intranet. This way you offer higher security for your conversations among employees. It will only contain the users of that company (and or maybe any affiliates they let into it), and you wont get random pr0n anouncements from outside individuals.
- A non-productive mind is with absolutely zero balance.
AC
People have been swapping pictures on IRC forever. Many users in computer-support channels offer repositories of helpful files to other visitors. Isn't this P2P? If the only difference between Napster and the Web in terms of file swapping is that Napster is a virtual network, here is another example of a virtual network (IRC) which people have used for over a decade now to swap files for many legitimate reasons.