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P2P Filesharing vs. The Web
The Importance of writes "The recent RIAA lawsuits have raised many questions and issues, but the focus has been on P2P filesharing. Before there was P2P, though, there was filesharing via webservers. There doesn't seem to be much complaint about the RIAA shutting down people who upload MP3s to their homepage. Why do many people seem to treat http filesharing different than P2P filesharing? LawMeme has one answer."
people dont file share anymore.. for the most part they just leach. Thats why if I use networks like direct connect that force people to share. People still try and get around that though.. its kinda sad.
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
Maybe because they got the ISP's to take down the servers, because they were hosted by the ISP's. P2P OTH isn't exactly an ISP hosted server, it's something differen't.
Of course they are going after websites that are distributing their music. Just exactly how many sites have you found recently that contain working links to copyrighted MP3s? RIAA's recent lawsuits have nothing to do with P2P applications in particular. They are going after people who are distributing their music. Distributing music with today's P2P music applications is not much different than creating a webpage and registering it with a search engine.
P2P is more popular than web-based sharing, so the RIAA can find more targets.
Esoteric reference.
There has been outcry over sites being shutdown for mp3 serving, it's was just a small shortlived outcry that was solved by Napster. If p2p is ever succesfully shutdown they will be an instant rush back to http mp3 trading.
vampirical
We need to use P2P as the official file distribution system for Linux. I think we should replace the whole ftp web based style with a clicknrun gui style P2P system for file distribution.
Because the majority of people use P2P software, so therefore that is what the RIAA targets.
The Novice user does not understand how or what "an FTP" is and does NOT know how to "send/upload" files to his "website" let alone create a page to link them.
As far as the person getting them. some may not even know how to get it to "stop playing in the browser" and actually save it to the desktop using right click (option+click if 1 button)
Not to mention the fact that when you type in "Britney Spears MP3's" in google you get anything BUT Britney MP3's... let's be reasonable here.
Even the most basic user can figure out how to install a program (in windows everything is "I agree" - "Next" - "Finish" - "Done") and type in a song name and grab it or share it.
Ave Molech Setting
To share files via P2P programs like Kazaa than it is to say build a webpage, upload it and maintain it.
...... Its trendy to do it P2P style after all HTTP isnt nearly as sued as say Napster was.
Also Webpage sharing is also harder to do say anonymously or at least with that feeling. Given you need a credit card and least some sort of contact info it appears to many that Kazaa is safer.
and The final reason is
OT- Does anyone know of a good Open Source Windows 32 Platform Firwall?
The reason is pretty simple.
People uploading stuff to webservers: takes a semi-technically inclined person to do it, webspace costs money, webspace is a lot more finite than hard drive space, doesn't get much traffic, doesn't get spread "virally".
P2P: Any Joe Schmoe can do it, it gets a LOT of traffic (millions of people on P2P networks, it's free, you can share as much as your HD can hold, due to the easy searches in P2P you get more traffic, files spread "virally" - one person can rip something and the next day hundreds can have it.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
"There doesn't seem to be much complaint about the RIAA shutting down people who upload MP3s to their homepage." - these people are the sharers,the copyright violators. The outcry over P2P prosecutions are related to the loss of files to leech. Grabbing the files is not the problem, making them available is.
If all the leeches were using websites to grab their music then there would be an outcry, but they don't - they use P2P so that is where the focus is.
Of course running your own server has its advantages. However, most of the folks with their own servers are not the people that use the PTP services. The folks relying on PTP are often fairly unsophisticated computer users who are looking for the latest song for free and are unknowingly relying on a infrastructure to find their songs. They don't know how it works, they just click and the song comes through for free. Hosting your own server requires a little more work which the vast majority of people are not capable of performing. (Although Apple is lowering the requirements for hosting your own Apache server significantly. One click and you are live.)
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Because an http server with files to download is more black and white. Either offering those files is illegal or not.
With a p2p network its much more shades of gray. Some people offer the latest Britney, some offer all stuff from IUMA, but most are in between.
Two reasons as to why more folks are hunting for MP3s on filesharing (and why these reasons have made it mainstream), hence RIAA's attention:
1. Easier to find files- download one app and do a search as opposed to having to hunt down different webpages for different files and all of the hassles included with that approach (dead links, 401s, etc).
2. More files available on filesharing (generally speaking).
I post my MP3s on my personal webserver in a streaming Jukebox so I can listen to my rightfully licensed music at work. but Google got ahold of my collection and returns my site with certain searches. I then ended up on a few H4x0r5 WAREZ-MP3 lists. Needless to say, within a week of this "publicity" my bandwidth was shot to hell. The RIAA doesn't need to shut down those that put MP3s on servers. Other leeches will take care of that for them.
On a side not, I still get occasional mails from people that find a google listing and ask for access to a certain song. I can deal with that.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
This is such a mystery, hmmmm... let me think about this for a while....
I think I got it!
I think it might have something to do with p2p being about 500 times more widespread as a way for mainstream folks to download music.
I'm a genius I know.
I don't think many non-geeks use anything but kaaza and the like.
I find it said that people need slashdot to make them feel complete. A story submission does not validate your life. Now go make some friends.
peer-to-peer SUCKS these days. I don't use it. It sure is a good thing a lil' program called 'bittorrent' came out! whew, that was a close shave!
bdugh
if you think im serious u really...need...to...get out more man...
(\(\
(^.^)
(")")
Saving sig aborted.
Reason: Your subject looks too much like ascii art
I think Mr. Miller at Lawmeme has it right: filesharing is more personal. A user can watch people upload the files, and enjoy the feeling that others enjoy the same music as he does; he can see what other people are searching for (primarily pr0n from my own experience); he can add, modify, delete files on the fly - in short it's a much more personal experience to share files from your PC using P2P than it is to offer them up on a website. Particularly if the website, like most, is hosted by a computer that you don't directly control. Further P2P is new. It still has that "new car smell" about it. It's also easier for the average user to install some software, fire it up, and click-and-share away. Most users are probably intimidated by HTML - even if they don't have to generate any, the idea of it will drive people away. They have the feeling that creating websites is hard, and that it's something they cannot do. They can, however, share files. Pierre
surely the real question is: How do we build a model so that new and established artists are funded by their fans _directly_, as opposed to through the middlemen/leeches/cartel operators that are the RIAA. Someone write an article on that please!
---- oh no - it's the RIAA and their $100000000 fine. I'm gonna take that so seriously...
i think the "learning curve" for using apps like kazaa and naptser is much lower (and much more highly publicized) than regular downloads via http. and with more publicity comes (naturally) a larger number of users, and subsequently, a larger number of files being downloaded. the RIAA was probably able to deal with a small amount of "piracy" the same way a software company would be (since it's just the nature of the business). but once P2P gained international notoriety and everybody and their 12-year-old cousin got broadband, a cd burner, and kazaa, the number of files and instances of filesharing shot right past the "acceptable" level
well, it's nothing one behind the ear wouldn't cure
The RIAA doesn't care about HTTP mp3 sharing?! Tell that to mp3.com!
Unless you host your own webserver, initially uploading enough of your files to make your site useful to downloaders would take far too long and be far too costly in terms of bandwidth.
With a P2P application you make your entire library of files available to the network with practially no setup.
This makes HTTP sharing pretty useless to anyone who can't/won't run their own webserver (which, I imagine, covers a large proportion of current P2P users).
I find it sad that people need grammar to make them feel complete. Finding a typo does not validate your life. Now go make some friends.
- The ISP
- The webhoster (customer of ISP)
- The sharer
ISPs have rights, and navigating through their rights to find some wrongs isn't worth the fight. Go for the source and if you can't snuff it, try to limit it (like using scare tactics/lawsuits)...Two fish swim into a wall, one turns to the other and says, "Dam".
I'm kind of amazed that the article's author missed this if he did any background research at all.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
Most webhosting services expressly forbid you posting copyrighted work on your website in the tos. Plus the people with enough bandwidth to set up a server at home(dsl and cable users) are unable to do so because they still have dynamic ips and are often forbidden from creating a server by their isp. you could set up a home t1 line but that would be prohibitably expensive for the average person who operates a warez site and it would be easily traceable. That leaves only hosting services operating in areas unaffected by us copyright law and offshore data havens.
read my blog
musings on politics and technol
Subject says it all. Webservers don't move, rarely get switched on and off and have eay to track owners, ISP's and domain registrants.
Okay, I talked about misspelling words, are you happy yet?
The protocol is beside the point. The evolution of file sharing has been largely a game of cat and mouse since its inception. The cat has not changed, but the mice have adapted and will likely continue to do so. If the cat suddenly gave up on mice and chased birds instead, HTTP would not be the technology of choice for file sharing, at least not for free. P2P with a central directory service is more efficient.
After all, there's really very little functional difference between P2P and HTTP - it's a negotiation between two machines to provide data to each other. P2P is really just a client/server pair per machine.
My Mac is running both Apache and Safari - what would distinguish it functionally from a P2P client?
While P2P and HTTP may be excellent ways of file sharing, for better or for worse, the RIAA _will_ stop them. Right now they have attacked legally, which is leading P2P developers to make some advancements in the way of encryption, anonymity, etc. The RIAA seems to realize, now, that there really is no way to stop technology. We have already won.
Now they are taking the overused advice of "adopt a new business model", which seems to be services such as Apple's iTunes Music Store (Soon for Windows), BuyMusic.com, Rhapsody, and soon Roxio Napster 2.0.
The new RIAA attack plan is to offer B2P services. The problem? DRM. If I buy a CD from iTMS, for example, it may be $9.99. I would buy the same CD in store for $14.99. No, I'm NOT paying five bucks for the album art, professionally burned CD, etc. I'm paying for the right to do with it what I want. There's something about having "SOMETHING" in your hands. They can't take that away from you, like they can with digital music.
P2P for me is a way of sampling music before buying the CD. This will never be replaced by a $0.99 deal, since I like to download it, and listen to the song throughout the day. At work I listen to different music than at home. At night, different music from the day. Walking music is different from sittin' or driving music. Rhapsody fails here, so does iTMS... you can only sample certain portions, while in front of your computer. It's not the same.
Why P2P is better than HTTP? It's easier. More people use it, than HTTP was used for MP3 trading. Does it matter? No, B2P will overtake them both. There IS a large number of people who ONLY want digital music, that's why they turn to P2P. These people will turn to B2P once it becomes "mainstream."
For the most part the RIAA doesn't have to do legal battles any more (though it is a nice source of income), they can attack it by offering new online services, just as EVERYONE has been saying for years. Me, I'll stick to brick and mortar, and P2P though.
The article suggest that there are many websites infringing on copyright by providing illegal music down. And the magnitude is at least comparable to P2P file sharing. The author is surprised that RIAA would tolerate such websites.
Where are those websites? I find a lot of site with MIDI clip. But I hardly come across any with illegal MP3 download. If they exist they must be in such small number or is really obscure. Seems like the author is commenting on something of false premises.
There's really no difference between running straight HTTP servers and running P2P programs, many of which rely on HTTP as their transport protocol. The issue of not having somebody online at any given time applies equally well to people hosting HTTP servers on their own machines. The only advantage that straight HTTP has over file sharing systems is that ISPs run their own and often give space to subscribers. That's really the only advantage over filesharing systems, and it's offset by the fact that ISPs are quick to remove copyright-infringing material.
Packages offered through my ISP- example-prepaid slashdot membership (no fee recieved until an individual signs up). Gamespy accounts, file front etc...antivirus-gaming services. Free trials as new offers arrive. Issues like security, refunds, etc. can all be done on the ISP side of things for agreeable businesses.
Giving a 100 dollar deposit to be held by my ISP for puchases is a possibility, maybe in concert with pay pal or the like. The ISP is a nice choke point, it is going to be used someday. I'd rather have it used for something that is to my benifit. Doing so has a good probability to reveal a more stable capitalist structure that right now isn't apparent. Plus(-note, trademark), it doesn't use my ISP account as a debit account.
Win I would do an exe thing on the desktop thing, html thing, shockwave thing. Almost the portal idea. With linux users it's easier because many are a bit more savy and bells and whistles are annoying.
Bored and Drunk. and canadasucks
The last article talks about p2p as a private transaction vs. http as a public transaction, and uses the analogy of handing out cdr's on a street corner vs. giving a cdr to a friend. This analogy is flawed though. Most p2p transfers occur between strangers, so you're not giving a copy to someone you know. A better analogy is that p2p is more like having a person shout "who has a copy of the latest White Stripes cd" on the sidewalk, and having some stranger hand him that cdr. It's not a private transaction. Just a different search mechanism.
Vote for Pedro
The media seems to be focusing on, and the RIAA seems to be only going after those who share the mass-market crap like Britney, Eminem, etc. I for one, am more interested in Asian pop, anime, classical recordings, game soundtracks, indie stuff, (indie) Christian music, etc. that are simply unavailable for sale in the US, whether you want to pay for it or not.
The Internet provides a unique medium to distribute works such as the aforementioned categories, whose owners can't/don't want to bother marketing in the US because the demand is so small in absolute numbers. In the absence of official marketing, it allows a building of a fan following for non mass-market type works, possibly paving the way in several years for more organized marketing efforts. Witness the growth of anime from underground fansubs to small marketers in the US, to recent feature theatrical releases (eg, Spirited Away). Without the initial underground sharing, you wouldn't have the word-of-mouth hype.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
I confess I'm a pirate. So are my friends.
We download, we vet the downloads. We upload songs to private FTP servers with the bandwidth we're not using when we're at work.
We have a trust based, friend based, non peer to peer, but distributed, quality controlled file sharing experience.
It's great. It doesn't get flooded with crap, it doesn't get flooded with music we don't like. Anyone with an account on the machines is known to everyone else.
Gosh it sounds just like some warez servers back when I used to have an interest in warez, or hacker BBS's when I had an interest in that.
The web? That's all a bit new fangled for us..
I don't read your sig, why do you read mine?
Congratulations! You got it!
Next three days are the weekend. I'm sure we both have better things to do anyways. Have a good one.
2) filesharing via webservers is slower (limited bandwidth).
3) filesharing via webservers is easy to spot. Either they make the site public and you can find it easy or they don't tell anybody and it doesn't really matter (if nobody knows where to download the files who cares?).
4) setting up a webserver takes some effort
P2P allows any idiot to share anything on their hard-drive. They can look at all the files all the other idiots are sharing. Bandwidth can be shared. Once a file is shared it is almost imposible to stop (you can bust 100 idiots but 100,000 more are still sharing the file).
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
For the clueless, that's a verb which has lost its amateur status.
There's a lot of filesharing going on on usenet newsgroups, with sites like easynews.com dedicated to binary file extraction from newsgroups.
And don't even get me started on IRC...
Features: Compulsory Licensing - Where Are the Defenders of HTTP?
... and one suspect that is no longer a major concern: HTTP.
Posted by Ernest Miller on Friday, September 19 @ 13:10:10 EDT
Boston.com has published an AP wirestory on the Berkman Center Summit Digital Media in Cyberspace: The Legislation and Business Effects (Harvard symposium debates future of online file-sharing). A very interesting gathering (why doesn't anyone ever invite me to these things?) of lawyers, lobbyists, artists, economists, academics and etc., discussing the future of digital media (see, Wither Digital Media?).
I found the following quote by Charles Nesson rather interesting, "There was a time that to make a copy, you needed a monk, and a desk, and months, and then Sean Fanning hit the scene." Now, clearly, Nesson was exaggerating his statement for effect. However, his statement does point to a common misconception about filesharing - many people believe that it started with Napster. It didn't. The MP3 format itself was causing concern to the record industry at least since 1997 and Napster was not founded until 1999. So how was music filesharing taking place before Napster? Many of the usual suspects that are routinely ignored in the press even today: Usenet, FTP, IRC
The Era of OF - Original Filesharing
Remember the MP3 search engines? Before Napster, college students and dotcommers were filesharing by putting MP3s on their webpages for download through good ol' http. However, webpages are relatively easy to find and, more importantly, easier to shut down for a number of reasons: primarily, because of contributory and even direct liability for the organization hosting the site. Consequently, such organizations (like ISPs) had (and have) an interest in shutting down copyright infringing websites relatively quickly (even absent the poorly designed notice and takedown "safe harbor" provision of the DMCA).
Yet there hasn't been much outcry over the fact that the RIAA has and continues to shut down hundreds of noncommercial websites offering copyrighted MP3s for download without authorization. The RIAA has even threatened lawsuits and gotten college students expelled over their refusal to remove MP3s from college websites. There has been concern (often expressed on LawMeme) about abuse of the DMCA's notice and takedown procedures, but not much outcry when direct copyright infringement has been shown. Why is there no outraged defense of http filesharing?
Legally Equivalent, but HTTP has Advantages
P2P and http uploading and downloading of copyrighted MP3s are, essentially, functionally equivalent from a copyright point of view. From a technical point of view, however, there are significant differences. If anything, http has some serious advantages over P2P filesharing in many cases. Although P2P would still be useful in a world where http filesharing were allowed, http could easily and more effectively handle the vast majority of filesharing. For example, http:
* Is better at providing access to the obscure stuff. Everytime you log onto a P2P network to download, you are relying on someone else being online at the same time with the materials you desire. For popular stuff, it is a virtual certainty you will find it. However, for more obscure works, or particular versions of works, you may or may not be successful at finding it right away. Having a work available on a website 24/7 generally solves this problem. If it exists, it can be found.
* Is better at sharing 24/7. If you really believe in sharing, wouldn't you want to share 24/7? Why deny people the bounty of your largess when you aren't online? Or, if you are online, but don't want to slow your own surfing experience, wouldn't it be better to move your filesharing to another server rather than turn it off altogether?
* Means security issues may be ameliorated. Many people don't really take security seriously enough. They don't keep their virus files updated, they don't patch vuln
people who got cease and desist letters for hosting things on websites that people claim they own....
Just how GameSpot send me a nasty cease and desist letter for posting screenshots with their logo, they wanted them down and that was their goal. To get them down and they did so as efficiently as possible. Suing individuals over a website would have caused a huge stink.
As far as I know, both Gnutella and Kazaa use http for the actual file transfers, thus transforming every p2p filesharing computer into a webserver. Since both sides are so similar, I'm pretty sure that the **AAs will just shoot p2p filesharing down as easily as they did with mp3 webservers. Yeah, it's like 50 million of them, but if they get 2 grand from each, it's a nice business :-(
I think this all really has more to do with the popularity of the media over which file sharing happens. This was mentioned a few days ago, but I can't find the article.
Whichever medium for file sharing (p2p, ftp, http, etc) has the most people sharing on it, will draw the most attention and user base. Likewise, the more attention a medium gets, the more people will use that medium. Snowball effect. If somehow p2p specific programs were outlawed and everyone started using http again, we would see that method grow in popularity, drawing more leechers and sharers alike.
To that end we might even see "webserver/search/media center" programs evolve to the point that they were no different than an modern day p2p clients (just acting as web servers too).
The point is, a positive feedback cycle builds one medium or protocol over another, and the RIAA is going to attack whichever target is biggest at any given moment.
... because the RIAA isn't trying to ban Apache.
T.
Lots of people use my app Andromeda on home-bound servers so that they can play their collection from work. Also handy is dynamic-IP to pseudo domamin service like DynDNS.
But generally because of bandwidth considerations, most want to keep their sites private anyway.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
Remember the MP3 search engines? Before Napster, college students and dotcommers were filesharing by putting MP3s on their webpages for download through good ol' http.
I remember back in the day, late '98 and early '99, when I was a college freshman, before Napster and it's P2P bretheren were invented. I didn't get my pirated music from HTTP websites. I got it from 2 sources. The first was a site called Scour.net, which searched in an HTTP page, but downloaded from FTP sites and Windows shares, mostly windows shares. It had a little application, the Scour dowloader or something, that helped you download stuff linked from the page. The other way I obtained illegal music was FTP sites. In fact, I ran one off of my college dorm connection, and the funny thing is back then nobody at the school really cared.
I have blog like everyone else
- Bandwidth... Which ISP would like to pay for the rush to someone who upload a bunch of popular mp3's?
- PR... Which ISP wish to get known for hosting users' mp3 files?
You'd probably need to get your own web server. But the bandwidth problem would remain even then. Decentralized networks are much easier to spread files on since there aren't thousands of users trying to access your web site.
Web servers seems much less efficient to me and more like a last desperate way to distribute copyright infringing mp3's on.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
You can do it with a station wagon. This is simple, secure and completely anonymous. It's also a good strategy against leeching.
.
Oh yeah, the beer is also better.
While the throughput is a bit slow at any given moment if your peers are more likely to have Tom Waits, Miles Davis and The Strawbs than Ms. Spears the signal to noise ratio is fantastic and you can get anything you want. . . at Alice's Restaraunt (excepting Alice). You can get anything you want. .
Oh, sorry. Flashback to yesterday's post. It's that damned brown acid again.
KFG
The difference is that "the middlemen/leeches/cartel operators that are the RIAA" provide access to major music publishers, who in turn provide access to musicologists, who are the only people qualified to testify in court that a song is in fact original and not accidentally plagiarized from some other popular song.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Try searching for "Counterstrike" on Kazaa. It will likely yield nothing. P2P could help the distrobution of legal files like CS or any given Linux Distro. P2P could really be desirable when looking at fileplanet.com or other such services that require you to give up your family medical history so that you can bugFix Tribes 2 for the 100th time. Remember when sites were willing to give up their first born in order to host your files? P2P could bring us back to the bandwidth happy days of 1998!!
When you put a file onto a Web page you generally have some idea where that file came from. That is, you generally know if the file is someone's free speech or it is someone's intellectual property. When you pick up and share a file via P2P you generally have no idea where that file came from, and don't know whether it is free speech or intellectual property.
Big Brother Bush is doubleplus ungood.
This is a little bogus...
P2P was never a target of the RIAA. It was the distribution of copyrighted material.
IIRC they sued several large ISP's a few years back over music being shared on websites. IIRC the MPAA also did the same.
These are easier cases, since you signup for hosting with a credit card. It's one person, and one ISP to deal with... it's pretty much an open shut case.
P2P has the twist of offshore servers, IP masking through proxy servers (and some speculate viruses will be used to proxy though other unkowing peoples computers and avoid lawsuits).
P2P is high profile because of the new technology.
The first thing I'd suggest is that the RIAA and its members are not concerned with selling more units per se, they want to sell more units of their hit recordings. These recordings have paid back their costs and each new unit, minus its notably small manufacturing costs, is pure profit.
As for the speculation about why the sturm and drang over p2p and not so much noise about http, I would note that, as LawMeme states, http sites are easier to take down. And so, let me propose that the point is to go after the unsolvable problem, p2p. After all, they can claim "we killed Napster, we subponeaed isp's, we even sued the 12 year olds and millions are still 'stealing' from us -- we cannot kill the beast. So, Congress, let's just tax hard drives, blank cd's, isp accounts, etc., and let the government, as proxy for the thieves, reimburse us for our losses." Because revenues from taxes are really pure profit. And would they split the reimbursements with their artists? Well, of course, I can't imagine why I would even ask the question!
Please note, the above analysis in no way endorses the RIAA viewpoint that the primary cause of their troubles is from filesharing. In fact, didn't we see that filesharing has decreased and, looking at their album sales, they are still selling fewer units.
Ultimately, you're absolutely correct. This is probably the most important issue that needs resolution. The recording industry "middle men" haven't been offering nearly enough value for the percentage of the profits they take, nor have they really shown good taste in their recent choices of who is "worthy of promotion".
Still, there will *always* be a steady flow of music swapping/copying - because most people realize that intangible items being copied never really equate with stealing tangibles.
Bottom line: You take a physical CD off the store shelf without paying for it, you deprive the store of that sale. (They had to pay to get the disc in the first place, and now they can't recoup what they spent to put it there by reselling it.) You copy a CD, the original is still unharmed and in the hands of its original owner. Nobody can prove you would really have paid the money out to buy the music you copied. No provable, direct harm is done.
As for theories about people feeling it's "more wrong" to post MP3s to the web than share via P2P, I'm not so sure that's true. If ISPs all gave you hundreds of megs. of web storage space for free, and didn't care about bandwidth used -- and -- if someone wrote a tool making it really easy to post your music to the sites without learning HTML, etc., it'd be just like the P2P network is today.
I think that this article brings up a very interesting point. I don't think that it is the technical "difficulty" of putting songs on a website that stops people from sharing songs.
There is a difference between sharing a song and downloading a song. People want to download songs. We directly benefit from being able to listen to a song. It's a selfish desire, although we can justify it in many ways (convience, cost, evilness of RIAA).
I don't think that ANYONE wants to share songs. We don't get any benefit from giving our songs to strangers, and we put ourselves at risk for lawsuits. On top of this is the effort that it takes to host a website and the cost. The only upside I can see is the possible ego boost or the chance that other people will allow you to download their songs.
So most of us feel no incentive to host mp3s on a website, and when people are prosecuted for it we feel no sympathy, after all we wouldn't have done it.
But p2p wouldn't work without people sharing songs, and so sharing your music directory is turned on by default in most p2p clients. How many Kazaa users do you think change the defaults? I'd be willing to bet that a good portion of people don't know that they are sharing their own songs, and wouldn't know how to prevent it. Other people who do know feel guilty if they download songs without sharing their own. Back in the Napster days I remember people would cut off a connection if you weren't sharing any songs.
When a p2p sharer is sued, we can sympathize, and we're afraid that it could be us next. But it's our desire to download and not our desire to share that causes our sympathy. P2P seems okay because we only see our end - we get to listen to a song that we wouldn't have bought anyway - no one gets hurt. We don't even think about the other half - that we are distributing all the songs that we paid good money for to any shmo with an internet connection.
I have a server sitting underneath my bed running linux. It sits on a 768kpbs (upload) dsl connectiona dn so far my isp hasn't said anything about it. Where I live the little rural dsl isp doesn't even have an AUP agreement!
heheh, just my $0.02
PeerGuardian
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
In my evil days as a frequent file sharer, I was quite consistent at cutting off uploads to anyone who wasn't offering anything to share. It didn't matter to me whether I had any interest in their stuff or not. But you can't have it both ways: if everyone is downloading but nobody is uploading the whole thing collapses.
You sick bastard, putting a goatse link in a +5 insightful post.
: // www.goatse.cx&[...]
Everyone else: note the URL:
http://macrumors.com/[...]&x=pwned&[...]&u=http
Hey look how much is being shared on kazaa.. about 4-7million gigs. Now look at your HTTP site. Not even a hundredth of that. Back in the days of Audiogalaxy and Lycos you couldnt get as much stuff as fast and as easy
Doctors do Massage in Longview WA now, who knew?
If I was a manager/competitor some place, 90% of the advertising is being taking care of a competitor. A reliable backlash with no investment other then knowing where/what people might be saying/doing in under a year will lead to huge sales for a period of time. May be necessary to identify or associate producers/copyright holders for maximized profitability.
I'd almost call it manufactured.
Psych profile suggest a change PR/advertising company with less then good results. Dangerous and stupid. If nothing else, a good education for the kids.
Still working on the liability issue, see you soon. Friendlies have been removed from harms way.
Unlike you, I was very happy to share the Anime that I found to others. I got a lot of joy seeing the GBs added to my F-servers uploaded data stats. On the main server, I had 8-12 (depended on my mood, more than anything else) open slots for uploading. Most F-servers on IRC had 1 or 2 (if you were lucky).
I only ran the F-servers at night or over the weekend (I was always the first one in the office, so I could stop them and shutdown the Windoze machines before my colleagues arrived.
My IRC nick was SXLain_Praha. Has any of you /.ers leetched from me?
By comparison, the P2P "sharing" networks are horrendously inefficient. It's embarassing how crappy the technology is.
I've been thinking about a whole new approach, where what's passed around are random bitstreams. You have to get several bitstreams from different sources and XOR them together to get content. Different combinations of different bitstreams produce different content. No single bitstream contains copyrighted content, and every bitstream can be XORed with something which will provide legitimate content. The bitstreams are passed around via netnews. But I'm not going to implement this; it's not something I'm really interested in.
You are either a vacuous tool or a petty and self-righteous snot.
::turns music back up::
Fortunately, you are not yet empowered to control my actions and I don't care if I hurt your feelings.
... I simply don't know how to. It has nothing to do with RIAA.
What app can I run - on a unix box - that allows me to allocate x gigs of disk/x amount of b/w to sharing on a globally searchable/accessible network, from my 'flat rate' DSL line, easily?
Tell me the app name, and how it works, and I'll run it. I'm a fairly competent unix guy, I just don't have time to 'search' for the best options in the p2p/new network protocols arena these days.
I'm sick of being left out of the creation of a massive, globally connected, well-maintained and administered p2p-based network of content nodes. As a hobbyist musician, I also have need of cheap (as in free) bandwidth for my works, so if I can do that by being a good node, then hell yeah, bring on the true net revolution.
So, tell me what to run.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Bittorrent is the ideal solution for this.
RedHat and Gentoo CDs are yet available this way. Don't know about other distros.
The article on Lawmeme conveniently forgets the fact that the last round of lawsuits effectively stopped web based file trading.
While this is only a number of articles on a couple of incidents, there is no question that web based file trading was effectively crushed by record industry litigation just a few years ago. With P2P, people thought they were anonymous.
However, the RIAA has consistently misrepresented the "safe harbour" clause. The intent of the "safe harbour" clause was to prevent ISPs from hosting copyrighted material on the ISPs' own servers. The identity part also had to with information hosted on the ISPs' own servers, but it appears that most judges are buying the RIAA's BS.
Welcome back to the Dark Ages.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Freenet [http://freenet.sourceforge.net/] is pretty secure as file sharing goes (although not really finished yet)
oh. you mean like this for instance?
doing a search for torrents on slashdot yelds more then a couple of results.
Perhaps you should look into it. Everyone else has already.