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.
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 THis means that many of the entries in the databases are either poorly annotated (poor), have out of date annotation (poor) or blatently incorrect annotation (really bad).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.
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!!!
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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
...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.
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.
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?
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!
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!
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...
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!"
---
Also, what the Hell(tm) ever happened to "innocent until proven guilty"? Or has the whole legal world become convinced that we're all Napster-using freaks bent on pirating more songs/videos/software then China?
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
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.