While US Blames P2P For Everything, EU Invests Money In It

from the a-study-in-contrasts dept

Wed, Feb 20th 2008 4:29pm — Mike Masnick

US politicians have, for years, been coming up with bogus arguments about why P2P technology is just plain evil. Most of these have little to do with file sharing of unauthorized material, but you can bet that it was the entertainment industry who put these ideas in our elected repesentatives' minds. There was the bogus claim that P2P was responsible for porn on the internet (despite the fact that studies have shown there's no more porn on P2P networks than on the rest of the internet). Then, of course, Congress started talking about how P2P technology was responsible for identity theft and was potentially endangering national security.

Over in Europe, however, the good news is that some folks there have at least realized that P2P is merely a tool, and as such, can help enable very good things as well. That's why it's nice to see the EU invest $22 million in helping to build a new, open source, BitTorrent client, designed to help broadcasters better distribute their content. Kind of nice to see in comparison to the grandstanding and misleading rhetoric coming from US politicians, blaming a technology, rather than recognizing that the technology itself is neutral.

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Filed Under: blame, eu, p2p, us

13 Comments

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anthony, 20 Feb 2008 @ 6:32pm

Dude, this is so cool. Can't wait too see what will happen. :)
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro, 20 Feb 2008 @ 6:49pm

Not so fast...
There's guaranteed to be DRM involved! Note that the BBC are also investing, and they've already made it clear (through their existing iPlayer system) that they need to stick to contractual obligations that require them to restrict redistribution of their material.

I'll bet the same is true of the other major investors
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- Steve, 22 Feb 2008 @ 11:00am
  
  Re: Not so fast...
  The article clearly says that its open source. This means that anybody can see the code, and they have the power to change it.
  
  Its very unlikely DRM will get implemented, and if it does, it should be very straightforward to remove it
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US, 20 Feb 2008 @ 7:24pm

america's conservatism is screwing it over....plain and simple
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- ranting loon, 22 Feb 2008 @ 5:29am
  
  Re: Conservatism
  Come on - the Democrats are more in the pockets of Hollywood than the Republicans. All the politicians are bought and sold, but at least complain correctly.
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Canadian, 20 Feb 2008 @ 7:51pm

Capitalists
Oh come on, Americans are Capitalists, through and through, if they can't make money off of it, it will sooner or later become illegal.

Speaking of which, I'm going to go home now and LEGALLY download some music. And who said Socialism is a bad thing? :P
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Shane Morales, 20 Feb 2008 @ 9:48pm

Canadian, if that were true I could go car shopping and pick up a case of beer on a Sunday. But, no, I can't. Instead I have to live with stupid rules passed by stupid people to appease even more stupid people (that would be the conservatives).

Geez, and nevermind prostitution.
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American, 20 Feb 2008 @ 11:02pm

Actually its the Christians and Jews
Who keep us from buying booze on Sunday and after five. There are plenty of liberal religious freaks in this country and they hold us back just as much as any political side one wants to champion or condemn. Of course, if we were ruled by Muslims, we'd never have beer and porkchops so go figure. Maybe that's the way to get behind the war... :-D
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- Serge, 21 Feb 2008 @ 12:40pm
  
  Re: Actually its the Christians and Jews
  Well, that's an interesting one. How do the Jews prevent you from buying booze on Sunday and after five? They certainly have no religious reasons for doing so. Perhaps you've confused "Jews" with "Christians" again?
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  - Steve, 22 Feb 2008 @ 11:04am
    
    Re: Re: Actually its the Christians and Jews
    Hmm...lets see
    
    Don't the Jews also treat 'the day of the Sabbath' like Christians? It's in the 10 commandments, which is respected by both Christians and Jews alike
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    - Marc, 22 Feb 2008 @ 5:13pm
      
      Re: Re: Re: Actually its the Christians and Jews
      Uh... the jewish sabbath is friday evening - saturday.
      Common.. basic knowledge about other religions..
      (I'm rc by the way)
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Anonymous Coward, 20 Feb 2008 @ 11:43pm

Why waste $22 million when there are already...
... at least 1/2 dozen good open source p2p clients? Could it be welfare for local software developers? No, Europeans would NEVER do that....

Sounds like that other hugely successful EU effort to build a Google rival.
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- SteveD, 21 Feb 2008 @ 2:02am
  
  Re: Why waste $22 million when there are already..
  Read the source mate.
  
  The idea of this project is to build a client for video streaming with a better regulated peer/seed system to support it, hence the BBCs involvement.
  
  None of the current clients can do that. The research is going on at various EU Universities.
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