RE: Senator Diane Feinstein Wants to know about the Benefits of P2P

["Michel Py" <michel () arneill-py sacramento ca us>]

> Peter Galbavy wrote:
> My personal reasons for any downloading of audio, specifically,
> in it's unavailability through retail channels. I keep picking
> up references to older stuff that has been dumped by the pop-bods
> many years ago and cannot be bought for love nor money. I may be
> breaking some law, but in these cases I do not feel a moral
> problem. If I could find the artist, in many cases I would even
> pay them the equiv. of the CD price directly. Perhaps the new
> business models that will have to be rolled out, either by the
> existing companies or new, will allow for the full back catalogues
> to be availale to those of us willing to pay - and then my minor
> infractions can stop.

ACK, same here.


> Back closer to topic, networks. P2P is a bandwidth spiral as we all
> know - more broadband, more sharing. Will it ever slow down ? Not
> in our career lifetimes I think. Whether legal or not, content is
> going to be doing this merry-go-round for the forseeable future,
> and the best we can hope for is to build and maintain the networks
> while it happend.

While I generally agree, there is a phenomenon that we might want to
consider in some years: everyone having a local copy of every movie and
music they want to see or hear. For music, this is already possible:
some people have thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of files, and
more and more get a jumpstart in building their library by massive dumps
of buddies hard disks. For movies, terabyte disks are not far away and
it's only a matter of time.

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.

Michel.