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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.
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
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 --
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.)
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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).
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).
- 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...)
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?
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.
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
It's fairly easy to put a robots.txt file in your top level server tree to tell google to mind its own business. You could also password protect stuff.
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!
which is leading P2P developers to make some advancements in the way of encryption, anonymity, etc.
P2P succeeds because it is public, and with no barriers to access. Without either of these it would be the same sort of fringe element that has existed for years (private warez "BBS'", trading groups, etc). Are the P2Pers going to put a banner proclaiming "N0 R1A4 ALLOWEDZ! LEEV NOW IF U THEM"? Are they going to encrypt songs in a way that every other Joe Schmo can decrypt, but just not the RIAA?
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.
- 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!
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.
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.