It's often said that
"legitimate" voices are an important part of moving the discussion on P2P and filesharing away from the
rhetoric of crime. BBC Newsnight Producer
Adam Livingstone has thrown his two cents into the mix, saying that filesharing isn't theft and that there are
ulterior motives behind some of the players in the debate. Most interesting to me is his assertion that ISPs are willing to block P2P traffic not just because they are in bed with the Hollywood cabal but also because they don't know how to deal with the huge traffic that P2P brings to their networks. They are engaged in what he calls traffic shaping.
It's terrible that emerging technologies are being mitigated and criminalized all together because some people engage in arguably anti-social uses and the old-school service providers don't care to catch up with the market's needs. Even if you think that much of file sharing is theft, is it worth the cost to innovation to shut down the mechanisms of file sharing entirely? Remember the argument that pr0n moves technologies forward that are later leveraged for more productive use? Imagine if things like home video were shut down using any of the above logic.
1. There's nothing too sinister about most ISP's traffic shaping, it's about controlling costs. Lots of traffic means more bandwidth, means more investment in fatter and fatter pipes. If people want to P2P, they should be prepared to pay for it - otherwise, the rest of us who really don't care either way end up subsidising the P2P-ers.
Posted at 10:41AM on Mar 2nd 2006 by GB