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House IP Leader Endorses P2P Blocking
Technical Writing Geek points out an Ars Technica report on comments from Representative Howard Coble (R-NC), who sits on the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property. In a recent editorial, Coble attempts to discourage P2P file sharing among young people, and praises Ohio University for its ban on P2P applications last year. Coble also suggests that identity theft is a great danger from file sharing. Public Knowledge is running a similar analysis, which argues against the main points from the editorial.
Excuse me? Aside from the standard malware risks and stupid users, how is P2P an ID Theft risk?
Guns dont kill people, people kill people.
We should outlaw cars too, look at all the people they kill.
I know this has nothing to do about murder, but they are blaming the technology for the crimes. If you get rid of P2P, something new will replace it.
Thats assuming you can get rid of P2P. P2P will not go away any time soon.
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
"Hey, X can be used in illegal ways, therefore we should make it illegal!"
Let's see, that can apply to everything from raw sugar to automobiles. Quick, file legislation to make them all illegal!
Compromised Windows systems are being used to flood the internet with spam in violation of various state and federal laws. Outlaw Windows!
Why cant these congresscritters get it through their thick skulls that there are plenty of legitimate uses for P2P, even in a university environment. A university in Holland is using bittorrent to manage 6500 workstations and it's saving them time and money. The university I work at uses SystemImager on its high performance research cluster to manage the software on all the compute nodes. SystemImager supports the use of bittorrent as a transport mechanism. If these aren't legal, legitimate, and highly useful implementations of bittorrent then I don't know what is. These are just two working examples of P2P being used in university environments in responsible ways, but I'm sure those stuffed shirts in Washington could care less.
Let me preface this by pointing out I'm a generally conservative young Republican. We're in a generational battle with our parents and grandparents and (more directly) the politicians that come from them over redistribution of our wealth and misappropriation of our technology. They want to put the screws to young people to maintain control, whether it's economic control (in the case of robbing the young to pay the old Social Security and Medicare), or entertainment control (draconian legislation in favor of the media cartels), or electronic expression control (clamping down on the freedoms enjoyed currently online). And we'll continue to lose this battle unless there's a shift in the political paradigms over these issues.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
If we're going to ban software used in identity theft I guess we can kiss the browser and e-mail client goodbye.
Some days I wish the Capitol Building had one of those carnival signs next to the door. YOU MUST BE THIS SMART TO RIDE THIS RIDE.
Really? Identity theft over P2P? Anyone who identity is so weak they could lose it by grabbing a torrent of Ubuntu probably has bigger problems than this congressdroid wants to address.
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Rotate the pod, please, HAL....
At my university and it did not stop anyone from using P2P programs ... they just blocked certain ones and everyone just used different ones ... waste of time and money if you ask me.
Follow the money - Coble's just taking care of his patrons.
Hrm, who do I see here? The RIAA, ASCAP, the National Association of Broadcasters, and the American IP Law Association, all in his top 10.
The only surprise here is how long it's taken him to get around to taking care of them...
Why not just ban IP communications altogether?
Or write-able drives? Or photocopiers? Or word of mouth... Or books.. Hell, lets ban knowledge.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Unless they want to disallow encrypted traffic (i.e. any traffic that they cannot decipher) entirely or squelch the amounts then what are they going to do about it? Probably nothing. It is also useful to look at the whole P2P blocking issue from an economic standpoint. What are the interests of the ISPs in this? They would like to preserve, to the extent possible, the perception of "good speed" for all of their users which might imply some mitigation measures merely to improve that value proposition for their customers...up to a point. However, the mitigation measures will have increasing marginal costs as more and more detection, protocol analysis, and monitoring hardware and software is purchased and installed until it gets to a point where it is cheaper to add more bandwidth (i.e. network capacity) than it is to invest in ever more expensive mitigation and monitoring equipment. The ISPs would also like to be protected from liability for what happens on their networks (or at least they should want this if they are smart...the MAFIAA lawyers would LOVE to be able to sue AT&T and Verizon for "allowing" P2P to continue on their networks) both as a hedge against expensive copyright infringement lawsuits AND even MORE burdensome government regulation of their business (i.e they are regulated already but additional regulation and the attendant costs would be unwelcome indeed to the ISPs and their investors). Finally, they would like to increase their customer base and if "content" is what brings in more paying ISP customers then secretly (although these companies would never admit it publicly) they would probably prefer to preserve the status quo of P2P if that keeps their subscribers coming back each month with those fees.
This old man has gone senile. As a voter in his district I will vote against him and I'm a conservative.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Because in the latter example, you're stealing material property. That crime is called theft. In the former example, you're copying data illegally -- that crime is called copyright infringement, and the difference is that nobody was deprived of a physical copy of the merchandise. Thievery means taking something physical or otherwise tangible (money counts) and depriving someone else of it.
As for admitting that you engage in willful copyright infringement... well, that just wasn't too smart, now was it? But people like you do give a bad name to those who use BitTorrent for legitimate purposes.
>> ...and praises Ohio University for its ban on P2P applications last year.
Its one thing for some old politician to not properly understand the technology that he is trying to ban, but one would think a university would be better educated than to assume ALL p2p traffic must be copyright infringment.