p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- I spend a lot of my time explaining to perfectly reasonable and intelligent people that P2P isn’t illegal, but every time, they respond with the stock standard answer ‘But I read in the New York Times’  (and/or) saw it on an advertisement on Foxtel, or somewhere) ”that P2P was illegal.

So I thought I’d blog about P2P so I can in the future merely refer people to this article and not have to explain it anymore.

Bonnie and Clyde got to be Public Enemy Number One

Politicians and the folks from the mainstream press would have you believe P2P is illegal.

It isn’t.

When  Bonnie and Clyde were finally apprehended, did the law make a big announcement about the 1932 Pierce-Arrow they were driving ?

Nope. It had nothing to do with their escapades.

Yep, it was fast. Yep, it had four wheels and a motor. Yep, it was used as the getaway car in over 50 bank heists. But the police failed to arrest Herbert Dawley (the car’s designer) as an accessory, even though his car facilitated bank robbery get-aways.

Meanwhile, Bonnie and Clyde escapades are long remembered and have entered the English language as a shortcut analogy for reporters to use in describing vagabond criminal adventurers.

Sort of like “illegal file sharing” has entered our language as P2P, and with that in mind, let’s examine word associations:

Select the appropriate response from columns a,b or c. Write down your answer. Scoring is at the bottom of this article.

(Don’t go to scoring yet. Read the article.)

We can use the art of stand-up comedy to demonstrate P2P.

On TV recently there was show called, the “last comic standing”. Of course, it obtained an audience from people wanting to smile and several of the jokes were good enough to retell (or plagiarize).

The TV program was broadcast via cable to many millions of homes.

In other words a central distribution model not P2P.

Some of the jokes were so good I found myself retelling them to friends the next day — sometimes to just one other person, sometimes more than one person, and quite often, my audience would relate a joke back to me.

In this way, mirth and joyousness was spread far and wide.

The fact commercial interests can’t be bothered to call the illicit file sharing traffic on some P2P networks by its correct terminology has led to a huge misconception in the minds of the public worldwide.

Is it laziness? Or is it deliberate misdirection?

Are the content industries, the US Patent Office and others all trying to prevent the Internet from growing?

Next time you want to talk about illicit file sharing or illegal file sharing, please call it IFS, because although illicit file sharers might use P2P to achieve the distribution of their warez, they could also burn them onto CDs and send them through the US Mail to their friends.

We don’t call ‘pirate’ content being sent through the mail illegal US Mail, do we?

So let’s call P2P what it is.

P2P.

And let’s call unlawful or illegal file sharing IFS.

——————

Word Association Scoring

Column A is worth +10 points each.

Column B is worth -10 points each

Column C is worth +5 points each with the exception of the mystery Joker answer, 8,C being worth 100 bonus points.

If you selected 8,C as your answer to question 8 then you understand the danger that P2P poses to Government or group of Governments that can no longer control what their voters say, or read, or watch, or listen too and why they might be desirous of being able to return to the days when they told the media what to tell us.

If you scored over a hundred please skip down to the next section entitled Homework.

If on the other hand, you scored under a hundred …

If on the other hand, you scored an enlightened and pleasing 100+ then your civic duty unfortunately extends past the consumption of this article.

And if you don’t follow the rules, anarchy will reign and the governments will topple and, and ….

Tom Koltai – p2pnet
[Koltai is an economist in Sydney Australia. He's says he's been online for 26 years, has run several ISPs and, "lobbied governments in four countries to prevent Internet restrictive usage legislation from being enacted". He says he's a strong believer in P2P, "as being a technological requirement to fully exploit the convergence of telephony with computers and remove the last barriers to human communication and interaction".]

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April, 2009

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 20th, 2009 at 11:32 am and is filed under P2P, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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