David,
What you don't seem to understand (or perhaps it hasn't been explained
well enough) is that BitTorrent is quite different from Napster, Kazaa,
gnutella, and the like. From the user perspective, BitTorrent is simply a
distributed downloading mechanism. It's like FTP or HTTP, but instead of
forcing everything to go through a single pipe (i.e. source server to
client) it allows other people downloading at the same time to help out by
sharing the serving load. I.E, while you're downloading the file you
clicked on, you happen to benefit others who are doing the same thing at
the same time.
Napster, Kazaa, Gnutella, etc, have this functionality (to some extent),
but in addition, they incorporate a search mechanism and have shared
file-spaces. Any files in your shared folder get put back on the network
every time you restart the client. For comparison, each BitTorrent task
is only interested in the _one_ _single_ _file_ it's downloading.
Sure, people can (and indeed have) set up servers to distribute
copyrighted material through BitTorrent, but they could also do the same
thing with FTP or HTTP or email or xerox or whatever. Don't knock it just
because it CAN be used to violate copyright.
In my opinion, this is a shortcoming of the FAQ. While BitTorrent is
indeed a "peer-to-peer (p2p) protocol implementation," if you look from
the end-user perspective, it's a downloader. The phrase "p2p" has been
usurped by common usage to mean things like Napster, which have a far
different use. A non-techie reading it is going to think "P2P, uhoh, the
RIAA is going to sue me for using this." The FAQ should emphasize that
instead of being just a downloader, it's a "downloader that helps everyone
else download too." It's not something that shares files except the ones
the user is already trying to download (unless of course the user chooses
to set up their own BT server, but that's a whole different can of beans).
-alan
--
Alan Hoyle - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://www.alanhoyle.com/
"I don't want the world, I just want your half." -TMBG
Get Horizontal, Play Ultimate.
_______________________________________________
plucker-list mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://lists.rubberchicken.org/mailman/listinfo/plucker-list
