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P2P Filesharing vs. The Web

Posted by michael on from the inculcating-values dept.

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."

2 of 222 comments (clear)

  1. Obscure works by Ryu2 · · Score: 4, Informative
    The article makes a good point about "obscure" (I'm guessing they mean from the perspective of a American teen/young adult) works being shared, and I for one, would like to see more of that, whether via P2P or IRC or HTTP, or any other protocol.

    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.

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    There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
  2. It already happened... by LuYu · · Score: 4, Informative

    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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