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.
Airplanes are inherently dangerous to railroad companies. Roll back the clock a few decades before cheap air travel. If Mr. Railroad Tycoon was suddenly faced with a flottilla of 747s prepped and ready to take passengers to/from EVERY point on earth, you can BET he would spend every dollar trying to prove that 1) it was dangerous and 2) it would cause him to lose money, thereby affecting the economy. After all, the railroads WERE the US economy for several decades. Follow the money, my son. Follow the money, and there you will find enlightenment.
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.
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?
The telephone.
Each phone both sends and receives data.
Wow - the US is spinning in a sea of shitte. Is P2P on trial now...?
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.