Senator Diane Feinstein Wants to know about the Benefits of P2P

Mon Aug 30 19:48:05 UTC 2004

On 30-aug-04, at 20:27, Henry Linneweh wrote:

> So I would like some professional expert opinion to
> give her on this issue since it will effect the
> copyright inducement bill. Real benefits for
> production and professional usage of this technology.

Peer to peer technology has the potential to allow individuals and 
organizations with modest means to reach a very large audience with 
substantial amounts of data. The example of software updates has 
already been discussed. Companies like Microsoft and Apple can afford 
to buy very large amounts of bandwidth so they can deliver these files 
to everyone who wants them individually. However, the same isn't true 
for free operating systems such as Linux and the BSD family. The 
technology is also very well suited for distributing free movies 
digitally, which would otherwise be prohibitively slow or expensive. As 
such, peer to peer has the potential to be a great asset to audiovisual 
free speech.

And that's just the obvious examples. Peer to peer technology allows 
for extremely robust distribution mechanisms, that are very hard to 
create in other ways. I'm sure in time, there will be more applications 
for it. For instance, peer to peer would be a great way to distribute 
large amounts of data to hospitals, fire stations and so on in case of 
wide-scale emergencies.