Senator Diane Feinstein Wants to know about the Benefits of P2P

Sat Sep 4 06:23:37 UTC 2004

>> Michel Py wrote:
>> In other words: as of today a large part of the bandwidth is
>> allocated to building everyone's collection of files. This
>> might gradually change to become bandwidth being used only
>> for incremental updates as huge local file libraries become
>> common place.

> Peter Galbavy wrote:
> But this possible assumes that production of new media will
> either slow or stay at a constant rate.

Not necessarily, IMHO. Maybe, maybe not. Number of Google hits for:
Rock and Roll:    6,230,000
Jazz:            25,400,000
Disco:           11,600,000
Hard rock:        8,430,000
Heavy metal:      7,210,000
Pr0n:           102,000,000 (spelled the right way :-)
There are only 24 hours in a day and I don't have 100 years to live.

> The never-yet-realised side effect of all this distribution
> capacity is that possible many more artists will have access
> to the listeners / viewers and in more narrow niches than the
> existing system allows.

Indeed, but there are two limits to this and one personal observation:
ymmv, but last time I walked into a record store I found way more
records by people I haven't even heard the name before than from people
I remotely heard about. I personally don't feel oppressed by the lack of
diversity in the existing system; it is not totally fair, but the other
side of the coin is that I have only that much time allocated to
watching/listening to what most other people have dumped.

Reality check: I never illegally downloaded any copyright-protected
content, nor anybody reading this, heaven forbid; we all are saints. I
am wondering though: among these criminals that illegally download music
(possibly behind a NAT box, double crime in certain states), how many
did download because they heard it on the radio (who does pay hefty
royalties)?

The two limits are:

1. How many songs can you listen to or how movies can you watch in a
day? Let's put this a way everyone understand: how much good does it do
to you if you can pirate 20 movies a day but only watch two?

2. Most people do develop tastes in certain genres and/or artists: for
example you will not find any Britney Spears nor Metallica on my disks;
I did download some due to the buzz factor, and I did not like it so I
deleted it. Remember that what we are talking about is bandwidth: just
because something becomes available on a P2P network does not mean that
I will download it. There is actually some content that you would have
to pay me in order to download watch/listen to. Information overload,
anyone?

To re-use your own word: niche. Niche markets do not shape an industry;
what shapes our industry (which is moving packets, and sometimes makes
people call us packet movers, short of box movers or carpet baggers)
_is_ moving packets. Bittorrent and eDonkey means something to us, not
two dudes FTPing a 40 year-old 15-minute b&w movie sampled at
10fps at 160x100. Bittorrent and eDonkey used to swap pr0n in French or
Swedish means more to us in terms of bandwidth than M$ XP SP2.

What I was trying to say is this: I don't expect the majority of people
to build a local library of anything that has been done by anyone for
the last 900 years. What I think is possible though is that at some
point every jazz lover might have every piece of jazz that is worth
listening, every top50 listener might have every song that ever made it
to the top50, and every Metallica or Britney Spears fan might have
everything that they ever released (note I am not saying this is good,
all I'm saying is that it could happen).

If we do reach this point, there are only a handful of titles that makes
it to the top50, and the bandwidth required to incrementally download
them becomes irrelevant.

Again, this is not an argument about "is P2P right or wrong". In the US,
we don't pay for local calls. Does it mean we all spend the entire day
talking on the phone just because it's free? No it does not, and the
same applies to P2P.

Michel.