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Google Wins the Filesharing Wars?
The Importance of writes "Compulsory licensing schemes such as those proposed by the EFF have been critiqued, but now LawMeme has an interesting article that claims Google will win the filesharing wars if a compulsory license is adopted."
Compulsory Licensing - The Death of Gnutella and the Triumph of Google
Posted by Ernest Miller on Monday, September 15 @ 06:05:16 EDT File Sharing
Never have so many companies fought so hard to change the law so that they can so quickly be put out of business.
Back in July, a number of filesharing companies (Blubster, Grokster, BearShare, eDonkey 2000 and LimeWire - Kazaa being conspiculously absent) formed a trade association (P2PUnited - website coming soon, apparently), to push for, among other things, compulsory licensing, as noted in this New York Post article (File-Share Firms Hire a Lobbyist). I wonder how much they have really thought this through. After all, a compulsory license that legimitized filesharing would quickly put most of these companies out of business.
The Death of Gnutella
Why do most of these companies even exist? One very simple reason: the courts put Napster out of business. Napster was an extremely elegant solution for filesharing. It acted as a massive centralized database that allowed downloaders to easily find the uploaders with the files they wanted. By comparison, decentralized P2P networks, such as those based on the Gnutella protocol, are clunky and have serious issues with scalability, search efficiency and bandwidth use. Although services based upon the Gnutella protocol have gotten better, adopting strategies such as "supernodes", they remain hampered in their efficiency by their very reason for being: avoiding contributory and vicarious copyright liability (at which they have been successful, so far - though the farther they push for efficiency and control, the more shaky the legal ground they stand on, see, Decentralization, Gnutella and Bad Actors).
However, if filesharing becomes legal through a compulsory license, what is the purpose of the Gnutella-based software anymore? Napster's liability was based on theories of contributory and vicarious liability, which requires an underlying copyright violation. To the extent that filesharing is no longer copyright infringement, Napster could no longer be held liable. Since the Napster solution is far more efficient, particularly for searches, why would anyone use a Gnutella (or any decentralized P2P) network anymore? Virtually anything a Gnutella network can do can be implemented in a Napster-like network as well. Sure, current interfaces are better than Napster's, but they could easily be ported from a Gnutella client to a Napster-like one.
All that effort, all that clever programming optimizing the Gnutella protocol, gone in a flash of compulsory licensing. Sure Gnutella will still be around, but what will it be used for? Why will so much effort be devoted to develop and optimize it? Gnutella will be, as far as I can see, a dead end technology, at least for filesharing.
There Will Be Only One
So what, you say? Of course all these companies will swiftly shift to a Napster-like network when the law is passed. Absolutely! However, it is very likely that all but one of these companies will soon go out of business. The reason is that, like the auction market eBay, there is reason to believe that very strong network effects occur in the filesharing market. After all, in the auction market, sellers go to where the buyers are and buyers go where the sellars are. If you attract more buyers, you will attract more sellers, which then attracts more buyers, and so on in a positive feedback loop. Such network effects should operate similarly in the filesharing market, though most people will be buyers and only inadvertantly sellers. For example, if I am looking for an obscure track, I will go to the filesharing service with the most participants, since I will have the greatest chance of finding what I am looking for. Therefore, once one filesharing service clearly distinguishes itself in popularity from the others, it will take off and its competitors quickly wither away.
True, there is nothing that would prevent people from participating in several file
I'm not Seth.
Never have so many companies fought so hard to change the law so that they can so quickly be put out of business.
Back in July, a number of filesharing companies (Blubster, Grokster, BearShare, eDonkey 2000 and LimeWire - Kazaa being conspiculously absent) formed a trade association (P2PUnited - website coming soon, apparently), to push for, among other things, compulsory licensing, as noted in this New York Post article (File-Share Firms Hire a Lobbyist). I wonder how much they have really thought this through. After all, a compulsory license that legimitized filesharing would quickly put most of these companies out of business.
The Death of Gnutella
Why do most of these companies even exist? One very simple reason: the courts put Napster out of business. Napster was an extremely elegant solution for filesharing. It acted as a massive centralized database that allowed downloaders to easily find the uploaders with the files they wanted. By comparison, decentralized P2P networks, such as those based on the Gnutella protocol, are clunky and have serious issues with scalability, search efficiency and bandwidth use. Although services based upon the Gnutella protocol have gotten better, adopting strategies such as "supernodes", they remain hampered in their efficiency by their very reason for being: avoiding contributory and vicarious copyright liability (at which they have been successful, so far - though the farther they push for efficiency and control, the more shaky the legal ground they stand on, see, Decentralization, Gnutella and Bad Actors).
However, if filesharing becomes legal through a compulsory license, what is the purpose of the Gnutella-based software anymore? Napster's liability was based on theories of contributory and vicarious liability, which requires an underlying copyright violation. To the extent that filesharing is no longer copyright infringement, Napster could no longer be held liable. Since the Napster solution is far more efficient, particularly for searches, why would anyone use a Gnutella (or any decentralized P2P) network anymore? Virtually anything a Gnutella network can do can be implemented in a Napster-like network as well. Sure, current interfaces are better than Napster's, but they could easily be ported from a Gnutella client to a Napster-like one.
All that effort, all that clever programming optimizing the Gnutella protocol, gone in a flash of compulsory licensing. Sure Gnutella will still be around, but what will it be used for? Why will so much effort be devoted to develop and optimize it? Gnutella will be, as far as I can see, a dead end technology, at least for filesharing.
There Will Be Only One
So what, you say? Of course all these companies will swiftly shift to a Napster-like network when the law is passed. Absolutely! However, it is very likely that all but one of these companies will soon go out of business. The reason is that, like the auction market eBay, there is reason to believe that very strong network effects occur in the filesharing market. After all, in the auction market, sellers go to where the buyers are and buyers go where the sellars are. If you attract more buyers, you will attract more sellers, which then attracts more buyers, and so on in a positive feedback loop. Such network effects should operate similarly in the filesharing market, though most people will be buyers and only inadvertantly sellers. For example, if I am looking for an obscure track, I will go to the filesharing service with the most participants, since I will have the greatest chance of finding what I am looking for. Therefore, once one filesharing service clearly distinguishes itself in popularity from the others, it will take off and its competitors quickly wither away.
True, there is nothing that would prevent people from participating in several filesharing services at once, but there is little that keeps people from posting listings on multiple auction sites either. People will most likely experiment with a few services at fi
Former Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf