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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."
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.
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
True. The other day I was moving files around between my Mac and Windows machines, and it was only after about ten minutes of dragging and dropping in Explorer that I realised I was using an FTP connection to the Mac rather than a network share (SAMBA).
Additionaly, this fuctionality is built into microsoft office 2k [can't remember if it was in office 97]. You can easily save file to ftp://blablabla.com. This feature when I started using it didn't seem to be in another other "save as" dialog box.
People may be critical of microsoft but this is a good and useful feature! Adding FTP as an option to "my network places" was a major bonus which resolved the issue of not all "save as" boxes supporting urls.
(OTOH, that means it was keeping the FTP password around somewhere, so that could be a security problem if you were using a public access machine.)
Not at all... all you need to do is use the "syntax" ftp://user@site.com and it will prompt for password rather then ftp://user:pass@site.com. Agreed there is an option to remember password, but it's foolish to check on it on a public access machine. Make sure that "remember password" is selected off. This goes without saying that you should change your passwords often if you are using a public access machine.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
And dude, don't insult just because you disagree. It just makes your argument sound childish and dilutes your credibility.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
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.
Mine is an even more fundamental problem.
I have a 3 GB per month download cap.
My ISP has a no "Servers" rule. Large uploads gets you banned.
I can't be a good server with my ISP Ts & Cs.
Getting onto a better ISP for me is well... problematic...
Regards...
That model already exists: mp3.com allows artists to publish their works on their site and there are a number of payment models to choose from. Another model is for an artist to sign up with a smaller label and try to get sold on Apple's Music Store. When the Windows version hits the streets next month, there will be plenty of potential buyers.
You grab a MD5 sum from a trusted source, so you can verify that the file hasn't been tampered with.
But like another poster said, P2P isn't great for low-demand things like most software. Right after release, it works well (and we've already got that covered with Bittorrent), but I can't see it being useful after that first window.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
That's sort of bizarre. (On the flip side, my bittorrent download speeds usually max out my cable connection the whole time.) Have you tried capping your upstream to something reasonable?
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
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?
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.
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