But Why Do We Need A P2P Bill Of Rights In The First Place?

from the funny-how-that-works dept

I came close to totally ignoring the news that Comcast has teamed with Pando and announced that it wants to create a P2P "Bill of Rights that would create "a set of rules that would clarify how a user can use P2P applications and how an ISP can manage file-sharing programs running on their networks." This, of course, is all a part of Comcast's suddenly very public efforts to deal with the fallout from the company's rather secretive traffic shaping efforts (and, it hopes, to avoid the wrath of Kevin Martin and the FCC. Of course, this process started with the relationship with BitTorrent -- which was woefully short on details.

This "Bill of Rights" plan is, in some ways, even worse. It's funny how whenever we see companies suddenly declaring a plan for a "Bill of Rights" (which should be about addressing consumer rights), it's really always about figuring out a way for a company to do the same stuff it had been doing all along without getting in trouble for it. It's basically a way for a company to tell the government "hey look, we're self-regulating!" even if that self-regulating is letting them do whatever they want. While it's nice that Comcast tied this to a relationship with Pando (the same company that's trying to help telcos deal with file sharing network issues), it doesn't change that the fact that this is a lot of talk with little action.

While the usual suspects have decried this plan for the press release vaporware that it is (while pointing to Comcasts' questionable activities when its traffic shaping was first discovered), a much bigger question is why we should even want a "P2P Bill of Rights" in the first place. One of the very reasons why internet access is so valuable (and why Comcast got into the business) is the open nature of the internet that allowed all sorts of new, interesting, unexpected and useful services to spring forth. When you start putting rules on it, concerning how an application can run and what a user can do, you're effectively shutting down that ability. You're saying that we have enough innovation, and any new innovation needs to be incremental on top of what we already have and within these well-defined limits. That's not a recipe for innovation. It's a recipe for keeping the status quo, while other places, that don't have unnecessary restrictions, continue to innovate and grow.

Filed Under: p2p, p2p bill of rights, traffic shaping
Companies: comcast, pando

Italy Says P2P Monitoring Firm Broke The Law -- But This Might Not Be A Good Thing

from the there-goes-that-evidence dept

There have been various accusations in the US that the techniques used by various P2P monitoring firms that the entertainment industry uses are an "illegal investigation." While we're still waiting to see the outcome of such cases, over in Italy, the government organization in charge of privacy has determined that, indeed, the efforts to monitor P2P use violates local privacy laws. This comes just a few months after a similar finding in Switzerland. With the EU recently saying that IP addresses are private information, you can see why these types of rulings are coming through.

While I will argue vehemently over the fact that the entertainment industry's tactics are wrong, short-sighted and unfair to many of the people it accuses of copyright infringement, I'm not so sure that merely collecting information that someone's computer broadcasts about themselves should be considered a violation of privacy. I do agree that ISPs shouldn't just hand over data on who's account is attached to a certain IP address (that's a privacy violation. But, to simply collect the data, which is publicly "broadcast" by the user, hardly seems like a privacy violation. There are plenty of arguments against the entertainment industry's tactics -- but you get into dangerous territory when you start declaring publicly broadcast information as somehow "private." While it may be appealing in that it makes life more difficult for short-sighted entertainment industry execs hellbent on suing customers, the unintended consequences of such things could be dire. It raises serious questions about how other types of publicly broadcast info may be judged later.

Filed Under: ip address, italy, monitoring, p2p, privacy

Verizon: Bandwidth Hogs Are A Tech Issue, Not A Legal Or Business Model Problem

from the making-better-technology dept

While AT&T has been siding with Hollywood in saying that file sharing is bad (so bad!) and that it needs to filter file sharing to deal with it, Verizon very clearly stated a few months ago that it didn't think that was appropriate. However, now it appears that Verizon has gone even further, in working with a P2P software maker to improve the efficiency of P2P to make it less of a bandwidth hog.

Now, there are a few points worth making on this announcement. First, part of it is clearly just hyping up one startup that is offering a "legal" P2P file sharing offering. Second, part of this is Verizon using the opportunity to tweak AT&T and make itself look much more consumer friendly (something that doesn't often happen with Verizon, to be honest). Third, this hardly means (as some have been suggesting) that Verizon is "file sharing friendly." It only works with the one app that worked on this test with Verizon. However, what it does show is that Verizon recognizes that "bandwidth hogs" really are a technology issue that can be dealt with via technology solutions on the backend, rather than legal or business model methods that make life worse for consumers. That, alone, is a lesson that hopefully other companies in the space (and politicians) will learn.

Filed Under: bandwidth, optimizing, p2p

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

from the a-study-in-contrasts dept

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.

Filed Under: blame, eu, p2p, us

White House Realizes That Outlawing P2P No Excuse For Gov't Employee Stupidity

from the phew dept

Over the summer, we saw Congress mistarget its anger over stupid government employees misusing P2P software to reveal government secrets by blaming the P2P software. It didn't take long for them to propose a law to deal with the problem. Thankfully, the White House is actually pointing out how unnecessary this is and how silly it is to target a single type of technology, when the issue is about how people use the technology, not the technology itself.

Filed Under: government employees, p2p

UK To Force ISPs To Kick Casual File Sharers Off The Internet

from the no-internet-for-you dept

Last November, we were surprised to hear that the French government was convinced by the entertainment industry that it would be a good idea to have casual file sharers kicked off the internet. Soon afterwards, rumors spread that the UK was going down the same path, and now it appears that very similar legislation is being introduced in the UK, even as ISPs and Hollywood have tried to come to a "voluntary agreement" on just such a policy.

As in France, this will involve a "three strike rule," with ISPs sending a "warning email" on the first suspected infringement, suspending the account on a second infringement and canceling the entire contract on the third. This seems to be a serious overreaction. Beyond shoving ISPs into the role of the entertainment industry's police, judge, jury and jailer, it also is a legal solution to a business model problem. The entertainment industry is still unwilling to adapt its business model to the new distribution mechanisms of the internet. That should be a reason to change the business models -- not change the rules of the internet. Only in the short-sighted minds of entertainment industry execs (and the politicians they support) would it make sense to change the platform to support a more limited business model, rather than embracing the new (more efficient) distribution platform and adjusting the business model.

Filed Under: business models, copyright, file sharing, isps, p2p, uk

Anonymous P2P May Not Deliver -- But It Doesn't Need To

from the do-the-math dept

Rick Falkvinge, the head of Sweden's Piratpartiet has just given a new interview, and it's worth a read. As you might expect from the leader of a pro-piracy political party, he's rather bullish on the future of filesharing:

[A]nonymous encrypted P2P is just a few years off (and encrypted BitTorrent is already becoming ubiquitous). More interestingly, our cellphones are increasing in capacity dramatically. When P2P debuted with Napster in 2000, the average hard drive was the same size as my cell phone memory is today. Using technology already available, BlueTooth 2, I can share content from my cellphone anonymously — say, in a café or so. This will probably just accelerate, with cellphones being more and more capable, holding more and more data, and opening up to customized applications. I'm betting that a P2P app operating on Bluetooth is not far off for the iPhone, for example. Imagine the anonymous sharing that will happen in the background just on the average subway train! The possibilities are very, very encouraging.

File sharing will find new ways — any measure to stop it will be ineffective the instant it is in place.

I can't say that I agree with everything Falkvinge says here. Although it's true that Bittorrent encryption is fairly widespread, the technique is employed to avoid ISP throttling, not as a useful means of protecting filesharers' identities. And anyone who's paid any attention to Bluetooth's miserable security record — or who has just been frustrated when trying to get two devices to pair — can be forgiven for laughing wryly at the idea of the protocol evolving into something suitable for ad-hoc high-speed filesharing.

Falkvinge's optimism about anonymous P2P is perhaps the most interesting part of his filesharing triumphalism. In truth, it's a considerably harder problem than he implies: the internet is simply not designed for two-way communication with a truly unknown party. Sure, black hats can spoof IP addresses — but that's a technique that's only useful for a one-way communique, such as when flooding a target with junk packets in a denial of service attack. If you want a response you either need to reveal your identity or relay the traffic through a third party who can be counted on to keep everyone's identities secret.

This sort of relay system has been successfully employed by Relakks proxy service, as well as the Freenet and Tor projects, the latter two of which also add encryption to limit the relay nodes' complicity. But if Falkvinge is counting on the lack of prosecutions against these projects as evidence of the technique's legal unassailability, he's dreaming. Given that both Freenet and Tor are widely rumored to be havens for child pornographers — and the understandable (if occasionally misguided) zeal with which such crimes are prosecuted — it seems like only a matter of time before someone operating a Tor node is arrested for facilitating illegal activity (the infamous Tor embassy hack has already attracted law enforcement's attention, of course).

But Falkvinge's larger point seems sound: there's no indication that P2P can be stopped. But this isn't because of some just-around-the-corner bulletproof technology; it's simply a matter of filesharers' overwhelming numbers — numbers that, as Falkvinge implies, may be better measured by the rapidly-expanding count of P2P-capable network interfaces than by the number of humans operating them.

Filed Under: anonymous p2p, file sharing, p2p, pirate party

Labels Concede That File-Sharing Isn't So Bad After All

from the a-little-late dept

Imeem, a social networking site that was in the recording industry's crosshairs earlier this year for allowing file-sharing on its network, has pulled off an impressive feat. This summer it settled its lawsuit with Warner Music by promising to give Warner a cut of advertising revenues from the site. Now the Wall Street Journal is reporting that it's signed similar deals with all four major labels, meaning that Imeem is now the first website whose users have the music industry's blessing to share music for free. What's especially striking about this is that for the last decade, the fundamental principle of the labels' business strategy is that sharing music without paying for it is stealing. They drove Napster, AudioGalaxy, Grokster, Kazaa, and other peer-to-peer file-sharing services out of business on that basis. As we pointed out way back in 2000, all this accomplished was to drive file-sharing underground where the recording industry couldn't get a cut of the profits. Had they approached Napster in 2000 the way they approached Imeem this year, they could have been collecting ad revenue from every file-sharing transaction over the last seven years. Instead, they wasted a lot of money on lawsuits, angered a lot of their customers, and ultimately still had to concede that music sharing might be OK as long as they get a cut. The only significant difference between Napster and Imeem is that Imeem only allows you to play music on its website, whereas Napster allowed you to download songs to your hard drive. But this isn't as big of a difference as it might appear at first glance. The Imeem website doesn't provide a "download" button, but there's no DRM involved, and it's quite easy to download music files from Imeem using third-party tools. And because Imeem's site doesn't use DRM, Imeem downloading tools are probably legal under the DMCA. So what we have here is the de facto legalization of Napster-like sites, as long as the record labels get a cut of the advertising revenue. It's an exciting development, albeit one that should have happened seven years ago.

Filed Under: advertising, file sharing, p2p, record labels, riaa
Companies: imeem, napster, riaa, universal

You Don't Promote Innovation By Holding Back Those Who Push The Boundaries

from the push-the-limits,-find-solutions dept

Mark Cuban has weighed in on the whole Comcast bittorrent kerfuffle, siding with Comcast, noting that he wants it (and other ISPs) to block P2P traffic because such traffic clogs the last mile and that's inefficient and a problem. This is, unfortunately, the same kind of thinking that the telcos love: that the internet is somehow running out of bandwidth, and the more controls that are put on it, the better. However, that's static thinking. It assumes a steady state, or, at best, linear growth of innovation and change. Unfortunately, that's not how innovation works. The more people push the boundaries, the more demand it creates for better, more efficient solutions, and the more incentive there is to create such solutions. Rather than begging for artificial barriers to be put up, Cuban (and others) should be encouraging such uses. They push the boundaries to the point that people learn where the next big friction point is, and they innovate to get around it. When people are using up last mile bandwidth, all it's doing is creating additional incentives to solve the problems and provide much larger pipes into and out of homes. For a content distributor, such as Cuban is these days, you would think that would be a good thing.

Filed Under: bandwidth, bittorrent, mark cuban, p2p, traffic shaping

Downloading Is Correlated With CD Purchases

from the correlation-is-not-causation dept

There's a new study out (via Michael Geist) about the relationship between peer-to-peer downloading and CD purchases in Canada. The authors found a positive relationship between downloading and CD purchasing. That is, those who downloaded more music also tended to purchase more CDs. It's important to keep in mind that correlation does not prove causation. In particular, I suspect that much of what we're observing here is simply the fact that people have varying levels of interest in music, and those who are more interested in music are likely to both download more songs and purchase more CDs. So these results by no means prove that peer-to-peer file-sharing isn't hurting the recording industry. On the other hand, it certainly belies the recording industry's simplistic claim that no one will buy their music if it's available for free on peer-to-peer sites. Clearly, there are a lot of music fans in Canada who have access to peer-to-peer networks and choose to pay money for CDs anyway. That might be because they want the extras that come with the physical CD, because they feel good about supporting their favorite band, or because they expect the audio files on the CD to be higher quality than the music they find online. Whatever the reasons, the recording industry should be figuring out how to capitalize on them, by coming up with new products that offer perks you can't get from a peer-to-peer network.

Filed Under: business models, cds, correlation, downloading, music, p2p, recording industry