No, bit tyrant simple uses a more efficent tit-for-tat algorithm to get closer to optimum trading efficency which would be a 1:1 ratio between each downloader. (seeders don't have a use for tit-for-tat unless maybe for a payback algorithm to seed to those who traded with you while you were still a downloader). This is very good if you don't like people who don't share.
Most other clients use tit-for-tat based algorithms that are more generous towards non-sharers. Which one is the best approach can be debated, but unfortunally bittyrant got a bad reputation from the start due to some bad choices of words when introducing the client.
As for the topic at hand. While most bittorrent clients don't directly select nearby peers, there is an indirect effect in that clients like connecting to other peers that provide good speed, and the most likely candidates for that would be those who are closer on the network.
However, due to how many ISPs have spent their money on the infrastructure, you often get more speed by downloading from someone far away that has better upload than from the neighbour that is stuck at 128kbit/s.
Movies Games Software Applications TV Books Comics Anime Audiobooks Pictures
It adds up. And how are they going to determine who gets how much? Oh I guess I know the answer to that. The collector agency gets the bigger part, and the rest is distributed based on some kind of algorithm that favors the current big coorporations.
These f***ing downloaders. They ruins the internet for people like me who just want to play games and stream music.
Http connections should be capped and get arbitarly reset. That is the only way to prevent those hidious leechers from taking up my precious bandwidth that could be used to ensure the best ping rates when playing Team Fortress.
Add the mathematics of fan-in, and no sane ISP would allow unfiltered P2P. Tell that to ISPs here in Sweden. The insane ones that is.
The first article didn't seem to contain any specific claims from MPAA at all. And neither did the last link, although its source is the following MPAA document that does contain a relevant quote.
They can, but if they do I'll just categorize them as the bullshitting coorporate profit whores that they are.
Same as I do with any coorporation that sell products with artifical limitations. Actually, as I don't really keep a black & white world view, I do have a sliding scale for it, but Apple is definitly not on the right side on that scale.
What this does seem to indicate however is that the Safari developer team is far better at bug fixing for what ever reason. Maybe they have better prodedures in place. Maybe their source code is better structured, making it easier to find a fix bugs. Maybe they have fewer bugs as a whole so they can focus more on the ACID test.
Of course, it could also just be a marketing move.
There was some debate a while ago by microsoft introducing the idea of having to mark standard pages with a special http header to trigger the new rendering mode, but they have backtracked and gone with a more sensible solution.
The new (more correct) rendering mode is now the default, and you can now instead add a special http header to force the browser into the old redering mode with all its quirks.
If higher percentage are needed for a grade, that is simply a sign of the tests being too easy.
A good test should pose questions with a wide range of difficulty. Even using less than 50% for a failing grade like the grandparent said sounds too high. If someone is able to answer almost half the questions you can't really call that failing, unless the questions are way too easy in the first place.
Yes I did, although I do have the excuse of not being a native english speaker.
Not that I would blame a native for making the mistake either as it is pretty easy to make. All it takes is that is that when the brain wants to express an opposite of rational, it mistakingly goes with the "un" form, which doesn't sound completely out of place.
Actually, it is probably more like people have an unrational trust that when they pay for something it is worth the price.
People get very suspicious when something is free. And often for good reason. The problem is that when something isn't free, they suddenly lose all that cynicism and become trusting little lambs.
As tap water is very cheap, there is very little unrational trust involved and therefore people check it out. However, when it comes to bottled water that people pay a lot of money for, they trust that it better (without any reason what so ever).
Which seems to be the standard way of handling things in the US goverment. Outsource everything to contractors. That way you no longer have to deal with peksy laws that restrict the goverment.
And as a bonus, if you are a politician, you can probably manage to get a seat on the board of a company that contracts for the goverment, giving you some extra pocket money.
Agreed. Protocols such as that are very inefficent. Note though, that they are only needed if you want to do live streaming. In those cases, server side distribution may be the best choice. Live streaming via p2p is still pretty much in the very early stages.
For non-live video however you can just as easily use the more efficent protocols such as bittorrent. As long as the client balances fetching early pieces with fetching later rarer pieces, the trading mechanism works fine.
It's certainly cheaper for the central server, but doesn't it just push the workload out to the local machines and network connections? Doesn't it just push the costs to the local user who pays for the bandwidth? Which is a good thing. Distributing workload to computers that would be idleing otherwise is efficent. Not to mention, that whole thing scales well so that the distributor can deal with a slashdot effect.
There are times I would like my email and web traffic to move a bit faster. Use local traffic shaping software (like cfos) to shape protocols. ISPs however should stay with shaping the bandwidth per user as their agreement with their users shouldn't be concerning specific traffic. They are internet service providers, not world wide web service providers.
Overall costs aren't reduced (in fact they're increased - home users pay far more per gb than a large business user does). Actually, I pay my monthly fee even if I don't use it, so my current cost per gb is 0. I do pay for upload/download bandwidth, but that I need in any case.
Server bandwidth and cpu have a higher load than the home user computers, meaning that distributing the load to those home users makes efficent use of infrastructure that is already in place.
Unless of course, there isn't infrastructure in place, like in the US.
then bitch when their ISP increases prices/introduces capping/blocks torrents completely. I bitch when ISPs cap/block torrents because they single out torrents. If they wan't to cap, cap everything. That is fair, and if they do I can decided how much my upload is worth when using torrents. And, no they shouldn't be allowed to hide the caps.
Here in Sweden companies don't seem to have a problem providing people with very high speeds though. Maybe because they have actually invested in working infrastructure.
And, no population density isn't an argument unless you explain big cities in the US. Besides, the Sweden isn't the most densly populated country. Yes, our population is more clustered than that in the US, but our internet coverage goes beyond using that as an explanation.
Bittorrent has a lot more overhead than HTTP I keep hearing this a lot. How much overhead? A couple of percentage maybe. That isn't a lot. And the overhead can be reduced by simply lowering the amount of connections you make.
Since theprotocol is very stupid and doesn't take routing into account, the total load on the backbones is also likely to increase. Umm, the protocol does indeed take routing into account, although indirectly.
It downloads and trades pieces with the peers and seeds that it can get the most out of. And guess which peers that is most likely to be. Of course those near the user himself. And if it isn't, that means that the backbone isn't really overloaded, so it doesn't hurt using it.
BitTorrent is not exactly efficient. It uses a lot more requests/connections/etc to download or distribute via BT than it does via HTTP/FTP/etc. The overhead is relativly minor when dealing with larger files. It is still the best argument. Minimizing the overhead needs to be a goal of an efficent p2p protocol.
SOMEBODY is paying for all that bandwidth/etc. Yup. However, if any peers deems that paying for the bandwidth isn't worth it, they should turn off their sharing and get everything from the seeders. It will take longer since the distributor is spending less on bandwidth, but eventually he will get it.
If everyone does the same, the distributor has to increase the amount he spends on bandwidth until the distribution basically becomes like http/ftp but with a minor overhead. And in that case it would of course be better to use http/ftp instead to avoid that overhead.
The only way to let this play out however is to let each peer decide for himself if spending their upload is worth it. This is one of the basic rules of modern economy. The overall pattern of all participating individuals is efficent.
If telecommunication companies in the US cap bandwidth, fewer individuals will share and the distributor will have to spend more on providing dedicated seeds to keep up the same download speeds, making bittorrent less profitable than the dedicated http/ftp downloads.
The offsetting factor may be the more distributed load over the system, since there's no central point, really. I'm not sure how much this really helps though. It helps a lot. I posted this http://torrentfreak.com/university-uses-utorrent-080306/ earlier in this discussion, but it worth posting again as it doesn't deal with end users, but an organisation using bittorrent instead of file servers to distribute patches.
The point is that we have already have lots of bandwidth that we use just to get things from servers to clients. This however means that the servers are working at full capacity all the time, while the clients are mostly idleing (both bandwidth and processor). What p2p does is use those idle clients to perform real work, thereby offloading the servers, decreasing the amount needed.
well two things. P2P is going to use more bandwith than straight http or FTP due to that whole enforced sharing thing There is no enforced sharing with bittorrent. Sure, you can get a download faster by trading pieces with other peers, but if you don't you will still get your fair share from the dedicated seeds as well as anyone else who stays on after completing downloading and seeds for a while.
A fair comparison is to compare a distributor using http/ftp with a specific amount of bandwidth with someone using bittorrent with the same amount of bandwidth. In that scenario, those using bittorrent would be able to download at the same speed as those using http/ftp just by connecting to seeds, and without sharing anything at all. However, if they decide to also share with their peers they could download at speeds that the http/ftp user could never reach.
Of course, the whole point of using bittorrent is so the distributor can use less dedicated bandwidth than if he used http/ftp by leveraging the upload the peers have to his advantage. So if you don't trade with peers, you will indeed notice a slowdown because of the savings the distributor is making on bandwidth.
That is however not because bittorrent is inefficent in any way.
Bittorrent does add a slight inefficency due to protocol communication, but that is a minor part, especially when dealing with big transfers. On the other hand, bittorrent ensures that files are transferred correctly by using checksums which http/ftp doesn't do. These are minor things though, and doesn't play a big role in the bigger whole.
Second high-speed bandwith nodes aren't peers but supernodes unless artificially throttled down reducing one of the advantahes of P2P. Sorry, don't understand what you mean by this.
P2P should be renamed the Popularity Protocol because it's vaunted efficiencies over other means are dependent on how popular the content is. Of course. Bittorrent grows more efficent the more popular the content is. If there only is a single downloader, the protocol is reduced to the efficency of ordinary http/ftp.
However, having a worst case scenario equal to http/ftp isn't a disadvantage. I dare you to show me a protocol that has a worst case scenario that is better than that.
Do they have enough upload capacity to deal with the initial "surge" before anyone has enough to seed? This is usually not a big problem. A single 10mbit/s connection is more than enough for seeding purposes. Even with a 1mbit/s upload that I have, I could managed to seed a full copy of a tv episode in one hour, and a little more than one copy is all that is needed to get it going.
Still, the rest are are all good arguments. There is also the matter of having dedicated seeders that keep older torrents alive. Also, if you have more dedicated seeding, the downloads will go faster for everyone. Just because you can seed bittorrent from a slow connection doesn't mean that you need to be satisfied with it.
You set up a network that work quite but not exactly like the internet and then complain when an application actually use a part of the internet that the network setup doesn't support. Your complaint is no more valid than me complaining that some websites don't work because I only allow outgoing http traffic with a destination port 80.
If you don't want to deal with port forwarding, you should either not expect your users to have full access to the internet or you should avoid using NAT in the first place.
Firewalls are no different. If you block all incoming traffic, any application that rely on incoming traffic will not function until you setup the firewall rules to work for you. And if you for some reason block outgoing traffic, you shouldn't expect applications that rely on that to function.
Besides your 5k/s or less complaint is mostly valid when you are dealing with torrents with very little dedicated seeding, in which case it is to the benefit of everyone on the torrent to not provide you with more than a token benefit which actually is equal to the total seeder bandwidth divided by the total number of peers (unless the seeder is using superseeding to weed out leechers, in which case you will get almost completly excluded). Meaning, that you should get atleast the same speed that you would have gotten if those dedicated seeds had used http for distribution instead.
Bittorrent is indeed efficent as it scales far better than http or ftp. A better example than that in the article would be the following article that was recently posted on torrentfreak.
The worst case scenario is when every single users deems uploading to be too costly for their own good and therefore caps it to nothing. In that specific case, bittorrent basically have the same efficency as http or ftp, needing the same amount of dedicated servers and bandwidth. There would be a slight efficency loss due to protocol overhead, but that is minor when dealing with large files.
In most cases however, the upload bandwidth of a peer will be less expensive than that of a dedicated seeder for the simple fact that the peer is idle otherwise, while the dedicated seeder is working at full capacity.
Also, spreading out the distribution costs on the users lessens/removes the need to actually have to charge the users for that same distribution. Even if the users have to pay some/most of that money to the ISP instead, the simple fact is that removing the need for micro transactions is a huge benefit in itself.
And for those who claim that bitlet is bad because the user is less likely to seed back as much as they take. Having someone not seed back is mostly a problem when dealing with torrents where there aren't any dedicated seeders, in which case torrents eventually will go dead.
For torrents with dedicated seeding like the one mentioned above, that simply isn't a problem. Sure, having peers provide as much as they take is advantageous, but it simply is not vital in that kind of environment. Tit for tat provides enough of an incentive for the peer to atleast provide bandwidth while downloading.
Almost entirely correct. It isn't an infinite supply per se that make the market price fall to near zero, but an infinite supply at a near zero production cost.
When supply is greater than demand, the market price will approach the cost of manufacturing/supplying the item. When demand is greater than supply, the market price will instead approach that of the real value. If the supply/demand balance is varying the market price will settle somewhere in between, depending on expectation on the future balance.
And all of the above is slightly simplified as it doesn't take into considerations things such as that of indirect competitors (one drink can compete with another drink even though they aren't the same) or the fact that different people has different valuations.
I wouldn't call that piracy. It sounds more like counterfeiting and fraud.
Piracy would be copying (which is not stealing unless you simultaneously destroy the original) the designs and creating your own product with it and distributing it under your own name, while also not making any claims of being the original creator of the designs.
Piracy isn't about deceiving, only about copying. Deception being acts such as falsly representing the source of a product you are distributing, or claiming that you are the original source of a design.
Of course, it is in the current powers interest that piracy is confused with these other crimes to make the piracy part look bad. So when someone is commiting two crimes where one of them is piracy, the crime as a whole is incorrectly called piracy.
Actually, with uniqueness I meant something different.
What I meant with uniqueness is simply anything that sets it apart from other similar products. Now that I think about it, there already is a similar economic name called "value adding".
I just don't agree 100% with the idea of value adding. More specifically, I think that a product can maintain its same real value while increasing its market value simply by being different than its competitors. Still, "value adding" is a good name 90% of the time. Probably should use it in the future instead.
due to the free rider problem. That free riders is considered a problem when dealing with non-excludable goods has more to do with the society you live in.
And if you are referring to the US when saying mainstream, then you are probably correct.
was to benefit SOCIETY by making creative ideas MORE WIDELY AVAILABLE Actually, the US constitution says it is there to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts. This is important because copyright and patents can never make creative ideas more widely availible. By definition they make the ideas less availible.
What they can do is increase the total number of ideas produced (although even that can debated). The price of getting those extra ideas produced is that the ideas that would have been produced anyway becomes less availible (due to inherent inefficencies of the monopolies that these laws create).
My personal opinion is that in most cases patents and copyright are simply a bad idea, unless society have a real shortage of new ideas.
Slashdot Mirror
No, bit tyrant simple uses a more efficent tit-for-tat algorithm to get closer to optimum trading efficency which would be a 1:1 ratio between each downloader. (seeders don't have a use for tit-for-tat unless maybe for a payback algorithm to seed to those who traded with you while you were still a downloader). This is very good if you don't like people who don't share.
Most other clients use tit-for-tat based algorithms that are more generous towards non-sharers. Which one is the best approach can be debated, but unfortunally bittyrant got a bad reputation from the start due to some bad choices of words when introducing the client.
As for the topic at hand. While most bittorrent clients don't directly select nearby peers, there is an indirect effect in that clients like connecting to other peers that provide good speed, and the most likely candidates for that would be those who are closer on the network.
However, due to how many ISPs have spent their money on the infrastructure, you often get more speed by downloading from someone far away that has better upload than from the neighbour that is stuck at 128kbit/s.
How many dollars per month for
Movies
Games
Software Applications
TV
Books
Comics
Anime
Audiobooks
Pictures
It adds up. And how are they going to determine who gets how much? Oh I guess I know the answer to that. The collector agency gets the bigger part, and the rest is distributed based on some kind of algorithm that favors the current big coorporations.
Http connections should be capped and get arbitarly reset. That is the only way to prevent those hidious leechers from taking up my precious bandwidth that could be used to ensure the best ping rates when playing Team Fortress. Add the mathematics of fan-in, and no sane ISP would allow unfiltered P2P. Tell that to ISPs here in Sweden. The insane ones that is.
The first article didn't seem to contain any specific claims from MPAA at all. And neither did the last link, although its source is the following MPAA document that does contain a relevant quote.
http://www.mpaa.org/leksummaryMPA%20revised.pdf Piracy cost the worldwide motion picture industry an estimated $18.2 billion in 2005. This
includes producers, distributors, theaters,
They can, but if they do I'll just categorize them as the bullshitting coorporate profit whores that they are.
Same as I do with any coorporation that sell products with artifical limitations. Actually, as I don't really keep a black & white world view, I do have a sliding scale for it, but Apple is definitly not on the right side on that scale.
What this does seem to indicate however is that the Safari developer team is far better at bug fixing for what ever reason. Maybe they have better prodedures in place. Maybe their source code is better structured, making it easier to find a fix bugs. Maybe they have fewer bugs as a whole so they can focus more on the ACID test.
Of course, it could also just be a marketing move.
It most likely is the default settings.
There was some debate a while ago by microsoft introducing the idea of having to mark standard pages with a special http header to trigger the new rendering mode, but they have backtracked and gone with a more sensible solution.
The new (more correct) rendering mode is now the default, and you can now instead add a special http header to force the browser into the old redering mode with all its quirks.
If higher percentage are needed for a grade, that is simply a sign of the tests being too easy.
A good test should pose questions with a wide range of difficulty. Even using less than 50% for a failing grade like the grandparent said sounds too high. If someone is able to answer almost half the questions you can't really call that failing, unless the questions are way too easy in the first place.
Yes I did, although I do have the excuse of not being a native english speaker.
Not that I would blame a native for making the mistake either as it is pretty easy to make. All it takes is that is that when the brain wants to express an opposite of rational, it mistakingly goes with the "un" form, which doesn't sound completely out of place.
Human lanuage processing is very interesting.
Actually, it is probably more like people have an unrational trust that when they pay for something it is worth the price.
People get very suspicious when something is free. And often for good reason. The problem is that when something isn't free, they suddenly lose all that cynicism and become trusting little lambs.
As tap water is very cheap, there is very little unrational trust involved and therefore people check it out. However, when it comes to bottled water that people pay a lot of money for, they trust that it better (without any reason what so ever).
Which seems to be the standard way of handling things in the US goverment. Outsource everything to contractors. That way you no longer have to deal with peksy laws that restrict the goverment.
And as a bonus, if you are a politician, you can probably manage to get a seat on the board of a company that contracts for the goverment, giving you some extra pocket money.
Agreed. Protocols such as that are very inefficent. Note though, that they are only needed if you want to do live streaming. In those cases, server side distribution may be the best choice. Live streaming via p2p is still pretty much in the very early stages.
For non-live video however you can just as easily use the more efficent protocols such as bittorrent. As long as the client balances fetching early pieces with fetching later rarer pieces, the trading mechanism works fine.
Server bandwidth and cpu have a higher load than the home user computers, meaning that distributing the load to those home users makes efficent use of infrastructure that is already in place.
Unless of course, there isn't infrastructure in place, like in the US. then bitch when their ISP increases prices/introduces capping/blocks torrents completely. I bitch when ISPs cap/block torrents because they single out torrents. If they wan't to cap, cap everything. That is fair, and if they do I can decided how much my upload is worth when using torrents. And, no they shouldn't be allowed to hide the caps.
Here in Sweden companies don't seem to have a problem providing people with very high speeds though. Maybe because they have actually invested in working infrastructure.
And, no population density isn't an argument unless you explain big cities in the US. Besides, the Sweden isn't the most densly populated country. Yes, our population is more clustered than that in the US, but our internet coverage goes beyond using that as an explanation.
It downloads and trades pieces with the peers and seeds that it can get the most out of. And guess which peers that is most likely to be. Of course those near the user himself. And if it isn't, that means that the backbone isn't really overloaded, so it doesn't hurt using it.
If everyone does the same, the distributor has to increase the amount he spends on bandwidth until the distribution basically becomes like http/ftp but with a minor overhead. And in that case it would of course be better to use http/ftp instead to avoid that overhead.
The only way to let this play out however is to let each peer decide for himself if spending their upload is worth it. This is one of the basic rules of modern economy. The overall pattern of all participating individuals is efficent.
If telecommunication companies in the US cap bandwidth, fewer individuals will share and the distributor will have to spend more on providing dedicated seeds to keep up the same download speeds, making bittorrent less profitable than the dedicated http/ftp downloads. The offsetting factor may be the more distributed load over the system, since there's no central point, really. I'm not sure how much this really helps though. It helps a lot. I posted this http://torrentfreak.com/university-uses-utorrent-080306/ earlier in this discussion, but it worth posting again as it doesn't deal with end users, but an organisation using bittorrent instead of file servers to distribute patches.
The point is that we have already have lots of bandwidth that we use just to get things from servers to clients. This however means that the servers are working at full capacity all the time, while the clients are mostly idleing (both bandwidth and processor). What p2p does is use those idle clients to perform real work, thereby offloading the servers, decreasing the amount needed.
A fair comparison is to compare a distributor using http/ftp with a specific amount of bandwidth with someone using bittorrent with the same amount of bandwidth. In that scenario, those using bittorrent would be able to download at the same speed as those using http/ftp just by connecting to seeds, and without sharing anything at all. However, if they decide to also share with their peers they could download at speeds that the http/ftp user could never reach.
Of course, the whole point of using bittorrent is so the distributor can use less dedicated bandwidth than if he used http/ftp by leveraging the upload the peers have to his advantage. So if you don't trade with peers, you will indeed notice a slowdown because of the savings the distributor is making on bandwidth.
That is however not because bittorrent is inefficent in any way.
Bittorrent does add a slight inefficency due to protocol communication, but that is a minor part, especially when dealing with big transfers. On the other hand, bittorrent ensures that files are transferred correctly by using checksums which http/ftp doesn't do. These are minor things though, and doesn't play a big role in the bigger whole. Second high-speed bandwith nodes aren't peers but supernodes unless artificially throttled down reducing one of the advantahes of P2P. Sorry, don't understand what you mean by this. P2P should be renamed the Popularity Protocol because it's vaunted efficiencies over other means are dependent on how popular the content is. Of course. Bittorrent grows more efficent the more popular the content is. If there only is a single downloader, the protocol is reduced to the efficency of ordinary http/ftp.
However, having a worst case scenario equal to http/ftp isn't a disadvantage. I dare you to show me a protocol that has a worst case scenario that is better than that.
Still, the rest are are all good arguments. There is also the matter of having dedicated seeders that keep older torrents alive. Also, if you have more dedicated seeding, the downloads will go faster for everyone. Just because you can seed bittorrent from a slow connection doesn't mean that you need to be satisfied with it.
You set up a network that work quite but not exactly like the internet and then complain when an application actually use a part of the internet that the network setup doesn't support. Your complaint is no more valid than me complaining that some websites don't work because I only allow outgoing http traffic with a destination port 80.
If you don't want to deal with port forwarding, you should either not expect your users to have full access to the internet or you should avoid using NAT in the first place.
Firewalls are no different. If you block all incoming traffic, any application that rely on incoming traffic will not function until you setup the firewall rules to work for you. And if you for some reason block outgoing traffic, you shouldn't expect applications that rely on that to function.
Besides your 5k/s or less complaint is mostly valid when you are dealing with torrents with very little dedicated seeding, in which case it is to the benefit of everyone on the torrent to not provide you with more than a token benefit which actually is equal to the total seeder bandwidth divided by the total number of peers (unless the seeder is using superseeding to weed out leechers, in which case you will get almost completly excluded). Meaning, that you should get atleast the same speed that you would have gotten if those dedicated seeds had used http for distribution instead.
Bittorrent is indeed efficent as it scales far better than http or ftp. A better example than that in the article would be the following article that was recently posted on torrentfreak.
http://torrentfreak.com/university-uses-utorrent-080306Dutch University Uses BitTorrent to Update Workstations
The worst case scenario is when every single users deems uploading to be too costly for their own good and therefore caps it to nothing. In that specific case, bittorrent basically have the same efficency as http or ftp, needing the same amount of dedicated servers and bandwidth. There would be a slight efficency loss due to protocol overhead, but that is minor when dealing with large files.
In most cases however, the upload bandwidth of a peer will be less expensive than that of a dedicated seeder for the simple fact that the peer is idle otherwise, while the dedicated seeder is working at full capacity.
Also, spreading out the distribution costs on the users lessens/removes the need to actually have to charge the users for that same distribution. Even if the users have to pay some/most of that money to the ISP instead, the simple fact is that removing the need for micro transactions is a huge benefit in itself.
Point in case, http://www.bitlet.org/Bitlet, the bittorrent java applet
And for those who claim that bitlet is bad because the user is less likely to seed back as much as they take. Having someone not seed back is mostly a problem when dealing with torrents where there aren't any dedicated seeders, in which case torrents eventually will go dead.
For torrents with dedicated seeding like the one mentioned above, that simply isn't a problem. Sure, having peers provide as much as they take is advantageous, but it simply is not vital in that kind of environment. Tit for tat provides enough of an incentive for the peer to atleast provide bandwidth while downloading.
Almost entirely correct. It isn't an infinite supply per se that make the market price fall to near zero, but an infinite supply at a near zero production cost.
When supply is greater than demand, the market price will approach the cost of manufacturing/supplying the item. When demand is greater than supply, the market price will instead approach that of the real value. If the supply/demand balance is varying the market price will settle somewhere in between, depending on expectation on the future balance.
And all of the above is slightly simplified as it doesn't take into considerations things such as that of indirect competitors (one drink can compete with another drink even though they aren't the same) or the fact that different people has different valuations.
I wouldn't call that piracy. It sounds more like counterfeiting and fraud.
Piracy would be copying (which is not stealing unless you simultaneously destroy the original) the designs and creating your own product with it and distributing it under your own name, while also not making any claims of being the original creator of the designs.
Piracy isn't about deceiving, only about copying. Deception being acts such as falsly representing the source of a product you are distributing, or claiming that you are the original source of a design.
Of course, it is in the current powers interest that piracy is confused with these other crimes to make the piracy part look bad. So when someone is commiting two crimes where one of them is piracy, the crime as a whole is incorrectly called piracy.
What I meant with uniqueness is simply anything that sets it apart from other similar products. Now that I think about it, there already is a similar economic name called "value adding".
I just don't agree 100% with the idea of value adding. More specifically, I think that a product can maintain its same real value while increasing its market value simply by being different than its competitors. Still, "value adding" is a good name 90% of the time. Probably should use it in the future instead. due to the free rider problem. That free riders is considered a problem when dealing with non-excludable goods has more to do with the society you live in.
And if you are referring to the US when saying mainstream, then you are probably correct.
What they can do is increase the total number of ideas produced (although even that can debated). The price of getting those extra ideas produced is that the ideas that would have been produced anyway becomes less availible (due to inherent inefficencies of the monopolies that these laws create).
My personal opinion is that in most cases patents and copyright are simply a bad idea, unless society have a real shortage of new ideas.