Brett Glass wrote:
At 09:30 PM 3/21/2008, Bob Frankston wrote:
C'mon -- what does P2P's legality matter then? Why do you mention it at all?
Because it emphasizes the fact that P2P IS NOT NECESSARY. It's not necessary
for free speech. It's not necessary to give users access to ANY service or
content. It is only SOMEWHAT useful to thieves who want to cover their tracks
(and if they knew better, they'd know that they can still be found). In short,
it is not necessary for ANY legal purpose; blocking it or prohibiting it would
only thwart illegal activities. And for that reason, it is not only perfectly
reasonable but a good idea to block and prohibit it.
--Brett Glass
Wine is not necessary. Dancing is not necessary. Beautiful architecture
is not necessary (witness the US in the 60s and 70s). Automobiles are
not necessary (they are in the suburbs they created, but those suburbs
are not necessary). In fact, humans existed perfectly well without the
Internet at all, thank you, for thousands of years. The Internet is not
necessary. If you were King, would you ban them since they are not
necessary for free speech? (No, since you'd be banning your ISP business.)
Note that freedom of the press is not necessary for free speech either;
one can stand on a street corner and talk. So how do you decide which
methods of free speech are to be protected? Do you randomly choose one,
such as standing on the street corner, then ban the rest, such as
newspapers? Our founding fathers and our courts think not.
Now that we've established the fact that one does not simply ban things
because they are not necessary, let's take a look at your premise that
it is "only SOMEWHAT useful" and only "to thieves" and that blocking it
would "only thwart illegal activities."
You seem to be assuming that the "things" you are talking about
downloading with P2P are such things as large copyrighted files. Things
like music files, commercial software or movies. P2P is not "necessary"
to accomplish this; http or ftp can be used to accomplish the same thing.
First let's remember the case of /public domain/ large files: remember
that all of these large files will eventually have their copyrights
expire and become public domain. It will be completely legal to download
all Beatles tracks for free some day, unless the laws are changed
(again). Second, using ftp or http to download from a site presumes that
the "source" has a big enough bandwidth pipe to support all the
downloads. "But wait," I hear you say, "all the legal sites like iTunes
and Sony and CBS have plenty big pipes!" Ignoring possible congestion on
specific backbone segments, the real problem with this is that it is
flawed in assuming that legal downloads only occur from huge commercial
sites.
What if I want to download the latest version of a Linux software
distribution invented by a college student in East Timor? He doesn't
have a high speed connection to the little server in his parent's house.
Plus, there's been an undersea cable cut near Egypt, so the remaining
(slow) links are even slower due to congestion. But he's put in such
nifty features that the world wants to beat a path to his door. His
connection is flooded -- and his local ISP is having fits at all the
bandwidth use. So this college student fires up BitTorrent and makes the
distribution available that way. Pieces of his software are stored on
torrent servers around the world. People can now download more
efficiently, locally. In fact, the latest version of Verizon P4P
software (this is in the future, mind you; did I mention that?) prefers
to download locally and save all the ISPs the cost of higher backbone
traffic. Eventually, the student even shuts down his BitTorrent sever,
since his software is replicated elsewhere. His local ISP is /happy/.
All the other ISPs are happy (well, the ones that run DSL or fiber to
the premises; shared media cable companies aren't happy, but most of
them saw the err of their ways long ago and started re-architecting
their networks; others fell on hard times are now considered the "cheap
Internet" tier like dial-up used to be). The Internet is happy because
the congested Internet backbone links aren't flooded anymore with people
downloading ET Linux (the cables will be repaired soon, luckily).
As an unrelated ironic end-note, I'd say that this situation probably
won't happen because this college student of the future in East Timor
will have higher bandwidth than US citizens of the future, since the FCC
here has done a horrible job compared to countries like Japan and South
Korea. And the FCC shows no signs of changing, since it would mean
eliminating the duopoly they've protected.
