> - queueing the track for download via kazaa Napster clones, kazaa, gnutella et al. rely on end-users to upload stuff. These end users simply have no bandwidth available for that. Cheapo DSL lines have hundred or few hundreds of kbit/sec unguaranteed upload capacity. No one is going to pay T1 to serve free stuff in breach of copyright laws.
The net result is - and anyone can try it for themselves - that average success rate is less than 40%, the speed is miserable - most of the time it takes hour or more for 5-6 minute mp3, and then you need to be lucky so that content matches the title. This makes it impractical for situations where many look for the same content, in near real time. shoutcast/icecast systems have 40-60K simultaneous users planetwide, with 2-3K simultaneous broadcasts. Most stations have 1-5 listeners, popular ones up to a hundred or even more (I have no idea who pays bandwidth for those ... some 128 kbit/sec jazz ones are really good, and have 200-300 users). All in all, this is negligible, a don't-care at this point. The broadcast tax is a preemptive move that is supposed to influence the future. While there always will be pathological cases that will spend tens of hours online to get few mp3s for free (that is, until local telco decides that flat rate is no more viable), for most napsters are unusable. Usable serving costs money, is stationary and therefore taxable. Until all 802.11bs automesh networks get connected independently of "internet". ===== end (of original message) Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows: Y! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your web site http://webhosting.yahoo.com/
