p2pnet.net News:- The multi-billion-dollar entertainment industry cries constantly that p2p file sharing is causing near financial ruin and desperate personal hardship. Hollywood and its hangers-on are fighting tooth and nail to keep p2p at bay, using illusory dangers presented by independent music and movie downloads as their excuse.

However, the real threats to the entertainment industry lie in the fact that p2p is now a primary means of communication in the 21st century, casting light into dark – very dark – corners which hitherto have been shielded from public scrutiny, with all that implies.

Now New York law student Thad Anderson has launched outragedmoderates.org which uses p2p applications to turn “peer-to-peer technology back on Washington to expose its inner, secretive workings,” as a Wired news story adequately summed it up.

Anderson’s Download for Democracy campaign offers .pdfs of more than 600 government memos, communications and reports from mainstream media sources, “respected legal or academic groups” and the federal government for download through through the Gnutella (via LimeWire and Shareaza), Gnutella 2 (Shareaza), and Soulseek networks.

LimeWire’s Greg Bildson likes the idea of using p2p apps in this kind of context. “It’s cool,” he told p2pnet. “We want to encourage this kind of use.”

And Anderson says on his site, “I believe that the internet can and will transform American politics, allowing citizens to fully realize the Founding Fathers’ goal of participatory democracy. The Download For Democracy campaign offers two ways for citizens to access government documents: by downloading the individual PDF’s directly from links provided on the Government Document Library page, or by downloading the PDF’s through Peer-to-Peer file sharing networks.”

To understand why he’s so excited about using p2p applications for political purposes, “take the example of the energy task force documents obtained by the Natural Resources Defense Council in the group’s suit against Vice President Cheney,” says Anderson. “The NRDC has posted these documents online in batches of roughly 25 pages. It took me about 4 hours, and in my estimation, at least 2,000 mouse clicks, to download all of the batches individually, and save each one to my computer.

“In contrast, using the Soulseek P2P network, you can simply right-click on one of the documents and choose the ‘Download Containing Folder’ option. With literally one click of your mouse, all 551 batches of the NRDC’s energy task force documents will be queued to download onto your computer. Within a matter of minutes, you’ll have all of the energy task force records that the NRDC obtained through its lawsuit.”

Anderson, who’s from North Carolina and who plans to work in public interest law, focusing on public policy/government issues, told p2pnet he’ll also submit a statement to senator Orrin Hatch’s Senate Judiciary Committee explaining his site’s use of p2p, as well as a brief description of some of the groups that were pioneers in using p2p for political purposes, such as freenetproject.org.

“While I doubt they will take much notice, I think it is worth a shot,” he says.

Mindblowing
How’s the campaign going?

“The reaction to the site has been better than I could have ever expected or imagined,” Anderson says. “In terms of traffic, the site got around 60,000 page requests in the week after the Wired article (which was the first media outlet to carry the story). To fully grasp how dramatic the traffic increase was, you have to understand that the site was getting more like 600 page views a week before that.

“What’s interesting is that I have gotten attention from two different groups of people: people who really relate to the political perspective, and people who are interested in the Download For Democracy campaign.”

Ironically, Anderson knew very little about p2p until recently and now, thanks to his decison to use it to power his campaign, France’s Le Monde newspaper ran an article on outragedmoderates.org, and about a week ago, “right after the Wired article, Der Spiegel, a German newsweekly, ran a piece.

“It’s pretty mindblowing to see an article about your website in another language.

“P2P is so powerful that it literally changes the whole ballgame in terms of copyright law – and that has a lot of legal ramifications that should not be ignored.”

With that in mind, how does Anderson feel about Hollywood’s INDUCE Act?

It’s, “definitely a drastic proposal,” he told p2pnet..

“P2P is still relatively new, and I think people are just scratching the surface in terms of what P2P can be used for. I mean, imagine if email had been banned in 1990 because of the ability to use it for illegal activities. I don’t think that’s an unfair comparison at all – if anything, P2P is more powerful and more versatile than email – and could prove to be similarly useful.”

For p2p downloads, go here.

To download documents using the Government Document Library, go here.

In the meanwhile, what applies in North America also can also apply elsewhere in the world, and government documents aren’t all there is.

Stay tuned.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 3rd, 2004 at 7:36 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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