P2P Manifesto:Peer To Peer Study/Project

Marco Montemagno writes " P2P Manifesto is a P2P study that I've done and also a project, released under CC license. This study (30 pages, available on a dedicated blog, in pdf format or in .torrent/blogtorrent) explain why: - P2P is unstoppable - P2P is positive for Companies - P2P is positive for the market - P2P is good for users All the readers can create their own P2P Manifesto, free to edit this original P2P manifesto. The idea is to then collect on the blog all the different P2P Manifesto's releases, to create a good knowledge base point about P2P issues."

Comments

This "paper" is a mess

[Nugget]

Sorry Marco, but I don't see why I should respect the results of a "study" when the author doesn't distinguish between "P2P" and "people trading copyrighted data against the owner's wishes". This manifesto seems to perpetuate the myth that "P2P" is a synonym for "piracy". Heck, the paper can't even distinguish between a Macintosh computer and a MAC address.

With such obviously lacking intellectual rigor, why should we have any confidence in your conclusions on the overall issue, which is far more complicated than many of the trivial things which escaped you?

P2P should be about people freely choosing to share their creations with the world, not about consumers choosing to violate the license on commercial goods that they'd rather not pay for. You do a disservice to the future of P2P and information exchange when you perpetuate the myth that the two are the same thing.

The goal should be making free-distribution licenses mainstream, not making it easier to violate licenses.

Re:This "paper" is a mess

[Angostura]

Because we all know that information, knowledge and ideas - and the effort required to devise, create and embody it/them have zero value, correct?

Oh that's not what you meant.

So you meant that anybody who expends work creating something that isn't primarily a physical object, has no rights over the fruits of their labours?

Well, apparently that might be what you mean, but I disagree,

I'm perfectly happy to stop using the words 'theft' and 'property' when someone suggests alternative words that adequately express the loss that the creator of a work suffers when control of that work is ripped from their hands without their say so.

Any suggestions?

Re:This "paper" is a mess

[shark72]

"I'm perfectly happy to stop using the words 'theft' and 'property' when someone suggests alternative words that adequately express the loss that the creator of a work suffers when control of that work is ripped from their hands without their say so."

I'd say that the response to this by many people reading this would be fuck them. If they're greedy enough to subscribe to this silly notion of expecting to be paid for their creative output, then they deserve what they can get.

Putting all concepts of right and wrong aside for a moment, I think many reading this will agree that said greedy content creators are a bit like the American Indians in the 18th and 19th century with their similar notions of "we were here first." Again, right/wrong aside, you simply can't win against a much larger group of people who have technology on their side, whether they're a bunch of settlers with guns who want your land, or a bunch of teenagers with P2P apps who want your song. This is how it has always worked. Obviously, there's an insurmountable gulf between a songwriter missing a few rent payments and an entire tribe being massacred, but the fundamentals of group behavior are the same.

Propaganda can be a useful tool here. Eradicating the Indian problem was made easier for our ancestors when they were fed the notion of Indians being diseased, drunken savages who raped our women. Likewise, today, although smart people know that the lifestyle of the typical artist is not a glamorous one, note how often it is that "artists are greedy, yadda yadda, limousines, yadda yadda, cocaine habits, yadda yadda they should just shut up and learn that P2P helps them" posts are modded +5, Insightful.

Nothing new...

[Lepaca Kliffoth]

http://crypto.stanford.edu/DRM2002/darknet5.doc That's from 2 years ago, a very well made study by Microsoft about the darknets. The "bad guys" already know that P2P is unstoppable, the battle we're watching day by day is only a facade.

..."Study"?

[Stween]

This guy doesn't seem to be aware that Peer-to-Peer application design is simply not new, it's only that people have become aware of "P2P" concepts thanks to Napster and successive file-sharing networks.

Page 13:
"Take back technology of let's say 20 years"... yet 30 years ago, peer-to-peer protocols were dominant in the Internet. Hmm.

Further, for a study, I'd expect some references. With interesting things such as, you know, FACTS and FIGURES. He seems to present an argument, with no data to back it up. This is like a high school report.

He seems to write.

In such a manner that William Shatner.

Would be proud of.

I'm not entirely sure what the point of this story is. Can someone please enlighten me?

my p2p manifesto

[br00tus]

I've a developed p2p program (Gnutizen - it can search and download files in Gnutella, but it's still beta and buggy) and have many ideas of where p2p can go in a technical sense. But if one puts sharing copyrighted works aside, there seems to be one main purpose to p2p - lowering distribution costs. If I am some kid in Portugal who writes a great Linux distribution, but can't afford to pay for the bandwidth of many people download 700MB ISO's from a web server every day, I can instead put up a torrent and leave it with one seed, throttling the speed to whatever I want.

Of course, p2p right now is often thought of as a single file - an ISO, an mpg, an mp3, a zip file). I see nugget has posted in this thread - the peer-to-peer programs which he currently helps maintain use p2p to do operation distribution, not file distribution. As does Folding@Home (which studies protein/gene problems in a distributed manner) and SETI. GPU is interesting in this respect as you are the one deciding what operations to perform - from adding 1 and 1, to calculating pi, to whatever. I really like Freenet - it is a very versatile protocol so that web pages, Usenet type forums, and even (small) file trading are all possible. I've even seen people play chess games over frost. And as a bonus, there is the option of (some degree of) anonymity on Freenet, so that is an added bonus.

I really would love to see someone with no money to host such thing create something as complex as Slashdot, with moderation system and all, and do it over p2p, maybe on something like Freenet, or maybe something else. The same with things like Wikipedia. Nowadays, the little guy is punished by high bandwidth costs if what he made is popular. With p2p this is not a problem any more.