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."

Comments

We need to use P2P

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Riaa doesn;t need to shut down webservers...

[flogger]

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.

Re:Are you kidding?

[SimplexO]

I point everyone to NameProtect. Their NPBot hit my page a couple of times before I told it not to. Basically, it scours your website and looks for songs. It then collects the links (not the music) and tries to get a bounty from the artist (?) by showing you that someone is sharing their music. It's other business model is that it can be contracted to find your music on websites.

from robots.txt:

User-agent: NPBot
Disallow: /

Re:People dont share much anymore

[kscguru]

People don't share because of the RIAA/MPAA threats. Not legal threats - those are too new - but cease and decist letters.

Most major universities (mine is in that crowd) turn a blind eye to P2P traffic... until they get a C&D complaint. The policy here: the networking people immediately cut off the connection. They will not turn it back on until a student says the offending file has been removed (honor code is involved - very serious honor code). And, if it really was the student's fault - that is, the student can't prove the letter was a mistake - it's a $80 reconnect fee.

The university I'm at has ~15,000 students. They get several C&D letters a week - many are repeat offenders. Just about everyone I know (or rather, who understands how) cuts off their upload and leeches in order to avoid C&D-type problems.

Get a single C&D letter, be out $80... whoops, there went the month's beer money. College students ain't stupid, not when it comes to getting that beer...