ISPs & P2P, Getting Along Without Getting Cozy 118
penguin-geek writes "Researchers at Northwestern University have discovered a way to ease the tension between ISPs and P2P users. As we all know, there's been a growing tension between Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and their customers' P2P file-sharing services, and this has driven service providers to forcefully reduce P2P traffic at the expense of unhappy subscribers and the risk of government investigations. Recently, some ISPs have tried to fix the problem through partnerships with certain P2P applications. The Ono project represents an alternative solution: a software service that allows P2P clients to efficiently identify nearby peers, without requiring any kind of cozy relationship between ISPs and P2P users. Using results collected from over 150,000 users, they have found that their system locates peers along paths that have two orders of magnitude lower latency and 30% lower loss rates than those picked at random by BitTorrent, and that these high-quality paths can lead to significant improvements in transfer rates. In challenged settings where peers are overloaded in terms of available bandwidth, Ono provides a 31% average download-rate improvement; in environments with large available bandwidth, Ono increases download rates by 207% on average (and improves median rates by 883%). Ono is available as a plugin for the Azureus BitTorrent client, an open tracker and an standalone service you can integrate into any P2P system."
Standard (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that it is stupid. (Score:4, Informative)
As far as I am aware, most bittorrent clients already search for the machines with the fewest hops and lowest latency. Translation: machines on the same NETWORK as them.
Because if I am on Comcast at home and you have DSL through ATT at home and our homes are within 500' of each other
Re:The problem is that it is stupid. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The problem is that it is stupid. (Score:5, Informative)
It sounded cool, but didn't work for me. I am curious if anyone else noticed similar findings, or if I am all alone.
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As I described here: http://www.aigarius.com/blog/2006/08/12/bit-horizon/ [aigarius.com]
If the torrent client chooses a peer at random and gets a peer across the world from you, then there will be bad traffic between you two. If all peers are such unlucky choices (which is a significant probability for high popularity torrents) then you will have low total download spee
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I just installed it and saw an immediate doubling of my transfer rates after I restarted Azureus. I'd have to say that it seems to work, at least for the torrents I have on the go right now.
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Been using it six month roughly too. I've only ever seen one peer close to me in the logs but, saying that, I don't use BT for new stuff, that's what Usenet's for.
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Re:The problem is that it is stupid. (Score:5, Informative)
From the FAQ:
Does this really work? In a paper pending publication, we show that our lightweight approach significantly reduces cross-ISP traffic and over 33% of the time it selects peers along paths that are within a single autonomous system (AS). Further, we find that our system locates peers along paths that have two orders of magnitude lower latency and 30% lower loss rates than those picked at random, and that these high-quality paths can lead to significant improvements in transfer rates.
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Availability of peers is likely to be the limiting factor in any real life situation. Using an app that's picky about its peers isn't going to improve that at all.
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No, but latency might be useful in trying to figure out which peer is closer to you on the network.
If it helps peers become available more quickly (Score:2)
And that is their flaw. (Score:5, Insightful)
The current torrent clients do not RANDOMLY pick an address. They check latency and hops.
Sure, it's easy to get HUGE IMPROVEMENTS when you choose to compare yourself against something that no one does anyway.
I'll wait to see what their app does when compared to the current methodology of the clients. I'd guess that it would be WORSE than simply measuring the latency and hops. Which is already done and done rather more efficiently than their method of querying 3rd party servers.
Re:And that is their flaw. (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason? Shaw owns a national fibre network that crosses the country, and you can traverse that distance without leaving their (impressive) network. In comparision, going to Telus, which is not that far away in terms of hops and latency, requires crossing border routers which, at peak periods, are very likely saturated.
One thing I wish my torrent clients would do is stop accepting uploads from peers with worthless transfer rates. When I have three seeds sending data to me at 120 KB/s on average, and forty sending data at 0.5 KB/s on average (and not downloading at all), those connections are accomplishing pretty much nothing. I'd rather disconnect from them, and try to find other peers with whom I can exchange data faster (in both directions).
Especially on private trackers, where the 'maximum number of peers' I connect to are all downloading from me at 1 kb/s each; this actively harms my ratio, because I have to seed the torrent for weeks to hit 1:1; I'd rather connect to someone else and ship them 100 KB/s so I can get the data out there faster, and not suffer because of people with shitty routes.
That, more than anything, is what I hope for this technology.
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I don't think that BitTorrent was designed with ratios in mind, but it was definitely designed with availability. Private trackers should track how long you're connected to the torrent, not how much you've actively uploaded. If you've been seeding for a week, but you only managed to upload a small amount due to other crappy peers, you shouldn't be penalized.
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BitTorrent was designed for scalability (Score:3, Interesting)
Early connectors are likely to have high ratios unless they abandon right after getting their full file, and late arrivers are going to be mostly leaching, and to some extent that's ok - but most people will get their files earlier if people are more generous, and also they'll get them earlier if they download from f
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Not directly but via what CDN's each user sees.
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It doesn't. Most BitTorrent clients are already somewhat location-aware, in the sense that they try to prioritize peers according to a number of factors, and each peer can pick and choose who they deal with. Between the two, things usually sort themselves out fairly decently.
Is there room for improvement ? Hell, yes! But I think this Ono thing is fixing a problem that didn't necessarily exist in the first place. What would be nice is to retool the algorithms to favor same-network peers, but that
internet gps (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:internet gps using Akamai's servers (Score:5, Interesting)
It's an interesting approach - you can also do things like identifying IP addresses by BGP Autonomous System Number, which will tell you what sites are in the same ISP, but you might get better P2P performance by connecting to a peer on another ISP in your same city than a peer who's on your ISP but across the country. (Most ISPs seem to assign ASNs on roughly a continent or country level.) So sometimes you'll get better P2P performance by picking close ping times, but as the article says, pinging lots of potential peers can take a long time.
Double Edged Sword (Score:4, Insightful)
As such, this will likely get spun as making the process of copyright infringement more efficient. Will that lead to this being blocked or otherwise pushed back against?
So Hold the handle, not the sharp edges (Score:5, Insightful)
Making P2P more efficient by aligning peer selection with ISP structure makes the ISP side less grouchy about it. This is good. The more precisely you can do that, the more you reduce the impact on the ISP's performance and costs, as well as getting better performance for the P2P system. So they're generally going to like it, though it's obviously a balancing act, because better alignment means you can also find the bottlenecks in your ISP and fill them.
So no, as long as you're not bothering Akamai too much, and as long as this works reasonably well with your ISPs, it's not going to get pushback.
Back when Napster was still around, it did some work with some universities to set up peering student-student rather than student-outsider, because that way most of the bandwidth stayed on the fat cheap university LANs rather than the thinner and rapidly-overloaded links to the Internet. Some of this happened naturally (students would show up as having fast connections, so students would generally upload from other students, but outsiders would also try to upload from students.) Napster could do this fairly easily, because they had a centralized database. Bittorrent and most other P2P systems today are designed to avoid having a centralized database, because it was a target.
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Uhh, bittorrent does have a 'centralized database' -- it's called a tracker.
Granted, there are some trackerless implementations but bittorrent wasn't "designed" to avoid having a "target". It was designed to efficiently share large files.
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Some companies that want to profiteer on it (e.g. BitTorrent, Inc.) are trying to get legitimate media outlets to use P2P, but it's unwise of them to do it; it might prevent crackdowns on piracy due to "substantial noninfringing uses."
Um... That's the whole point.
P2P was intended for file sharing what was it's original purpose, but it always had problems due to residential users having a lower upload than download. Bit torrent was written to solve this problem and now people are capable of downloading and distributing huge amounts of data that would have previously been inconceivable.
P2P is a perfectly legal and legitimate way to distribute media and the more people we get on our side the more we can fight people who are trying to contr
Asymmetrical service is not a "problem." (Score:2)
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It's the best way to allocate limited resources. P2P breaks the asymmetrical bandwidth model not because it is any more efficient but rather because it allows the content provider's costs to be shifted from the content provider to the ISP.
The ISP doesn't pay anything, unless they are providing FREE service.
But some content providers don't want to pay their freight. They want to shift the cost of distributing their content to someone else.
How is a content provider who uses bit torrent NOT paying for distribution?
I know people who are paying hundreds of dollars a month to distribute via bit torrent. Bandwidth cost's money and if the user is happy to contribute some bandwidth towards distribution, then why shouldn't they? I see plenty of PayPal donation buttons on website's, how is bandwidth different.
100% of my website's and content (although it's been awhile now) are/wher
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Yes, it does, because it is providing flat rate service. The user pays it no more money, but its costs go through the roof. Hence, the distributor of the content is setting up a server on their networks and taking service from them without compensation.
It is not paying its freight to transport its content to the Internet backbone. This is the fundamental contra
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This is the fundamental contract of the privatized Internet: everyone pays his or her way to the backbone.
Then where is the problem?
P2P is a method of (a) shifting costs and (b) avoiding the establishment of centrally located sites which can be shut down
That's the advantage of it, Yes
The Internet has always been about freespeech and allowing others to voice there opinions. Why should only the rich be allowed to distribute their content? Do you know what it cost to run a server? I don't know many people who could afford to do so let alone
have the knowledge to manage the server.
Yes, it does, because it is providing flat rate service. The user pays it no more money, but its costs go through the roof. Hence, the distributor of the content is setting up a server on their networks and taking service from them without compensation.
Hang on, are you saying that the ISP shouldn't have to provide the service their customer paid for?
I think most consumer protection laws would disagree wi
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The problem comes when content providers refuse to pay their freight.
Which has nothing to do with P2P, since P2P is not used to voice one's own opinion. It's used to make illicit copies of others' work or to distribute content which should be distributed via other means.
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What the hell am I doing paying $300 a month when I can apparently get the service for free with a $15 domain name.
You claim that content providers should pay for their content and then sprout bullshit that they should obtain their service's for free. The problem is that is infrastructure isn't free at the end of the day someone has to pay.
The customer did not pay to operate a server (see the terms of service for virtually all residential Internet service). And the content provider did not pay for any service from the ISP at all.
P2P isn't a server you obviously DON'T know what a server (or P2P) i
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Making P2P more efficient by aligning peer selection with ISP structure makes the ISP side less grouchy about it. This is good. The more precisely you can do that, the more you reduce the impact on the ISP's performance and costs
Yeah... maybe. Or maybe heavy BitTorrent users will just download more stuff in the same amount of time, keeping last-mile network utilization constant.
Basically, most of the "recreational" P2P users I've known just download as much as they reasonably can; the faster their network connection, the more they download.
So more efficient P2P algorithms will help keep network utilization down from people like me (I use BitTorrent occasionally to download large files when it's convenient, or is the default m
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There are two groups of people who don't like P2P - the RIAA who want to spin it as content thievery (which, ok, it often is), and the ISPs, who don't like getting their networks swamped and having to pay more for transit with upstream ISPs or increasing the size of their peering with peers and their internal distribution links. Right now, both of those forces are pointed in the same direction.
Well, you might notice that the cable companies are doing a lot of throttling and the phone companies... aren't. Why do you think that is? It's because the lion's share of bittorrent traffic is video, often the very same video the cable companies are broadcasting. IPTV has been taking off in a huge way lately. They don't want the competition, which is why they're not going to cooperate with this initiative. Their partnership with bittorrent is about mooching their user's bandwidth to SELL PPV video and mov
Re:Double Edged Sword (Score:4, Funny)
As such, this will likely get spun as making the process of violent crime|drug abuse|premarital sex|rape|taking our jobs more efficient. Will that lead to this being blocked or otherwise pushed back against?
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Further, how does the ISP know something is legit or not? What if some indy or signed band or director wants to start distributing music/movies (free license or not) via p2p?
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Must we always come back to this? This was already answered once and for all:The Evil Bit [wikipedia.org].
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ISPs have no liability under the DMCA, as long as they follow those guidelines.
ISPs are exempted as common carriers as long as they don't censor traffic.
ISPs do pay their upstream provider for each byte. So when 10% of the users are using 90% of the bandwidth, they quite rationally understand that losing that 10% will pay for itself in data transfer savings. It makes perfect sense. And since they share this common enemy with the content cartels, they're obvious allies in the fight for legislat
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Hot breaking news from Mon Jun 27, 2005 10:59 AM!
Cable Internet Service Not Common Carrier [slashdot.org]
-
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I paid for my connection!
Fortunatly in Australia we have consumer protection laws that protect us from fraud.
Well, that took long enough (Score:5, Interesting)
That's been the trouble with these "peer to peer" protocols. The routing algorithms have been horribly inefficient. It's quite possible to have the same data flowing in both directions on the same pipe. Multiple copies, even.
It might be cheaper for the telecom industry (which is big) to buy out the music industry (which is tiny) and just cache the RIAA's entire output on local servers. Just cacheing the top 100 releases or so might cut traffic in half.
(This won't scale to movies, though. Movies are bigger and more expensive to make.)
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I've thought the same about work places that allow streaming music. Put in a media server that pulls the top X streams down once, and then internal users could hit that. Rather than several hundred streams, maybe you cut it down by 80%.
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Multicast would do wonders on the internet for anything with a high volume.
We see some variation of this thought expressed in every p2p/bandwidth related story but would it actually help that much?
How is multicast going to reduce the bandwidth requirements of video on demand (i.e: Netflix instant view) applications? You request something, the server sends it to you. Unless somebody else is requesting that exact same movie (and requesting it at the exact same time as you) how the hell does multicast help?
It might be useful for live events (think of the Presidential Debates)
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Multicast doesn't magically help with every possible application, but it *would* help with classical block-based P2P file trading.
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On demand stuff can only benef
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Someone probably is requesting the exact same movie at roughly the same time. Have a few multicast streams going that are offset by some interval. You request the chunks that aren't being multicast, then synchronize to the first available multicast stream when it's available.
10 minute tape delay (Score:3, Informative)
How is multicast going to reduce the bandwidth requirements of video on demand (i.e: Netflix instant view) applications? You request something, the server sends it to you. Unless somebody else is requesting that exact same movie (and requesting it at the exact same time as you) how the hell does multicast help?
The first ten minutes are streamed normally. At some time during this ten-minute period, everyone else watching the same movie as you and who started within the same ten-minute period gets a multicast stream of the second ten minutes. Continue until the entire movie has been streamed in ten-minute blocks.
Re:Well, that took long enough (Score:5, Insightful)
Distribution could be wildly efficient if the users and the network operators were on the "same team." If they wanted to, they could design a bit-torrent variant where chunks are cached by intermediary servers, so that they can always be delivered quickly from a local node. Further, servers could maintain accurate models of network topology, and clients could then use this data to pick the best path. Chunks from popular files would almost always be available from a nearby server cache or a nearby peer.
The problem is that the network is either indifferent to user activities, or actively trying to prevent user activities (throttling, etc.). The end result is that the protocol is tweaked not for efficiency, but for circumvention (e.g. encryption).
I like the idea presented in the summary, since it is in principle a net benefit to both the users and the network operators. However even if it works, it may not last. For instance, ISPs may use even more aggressive tricks (maybe even exploiting this proposed variant), forcing the protocol to become even more inefficient (e.g. switching to a multi-hop TOR-like protocol).
Remote Location Prejudice? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Remote Location Prejudice? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Does this ever actually happen in the real world? I'm doubtless spoiled living in the United States but I've never seen a traceroute with more than 30 or 35 hops on it. Isn't the lowest default TTL for any (major) operating system at least 64?
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Good Morning Internet (Score:4, Informative)
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If so, then I guess you're probably missing something. However, if you're in that situation, you can put torrenting for prawns near the bottom of the list.
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Isn't this what TTL is for? (Score:1)
Can't the torrent clients simply check the TTL value and then prefer closer peers?
Man talk about re-invent the wheel.
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The story is thus a bit more complicated than just TTL's and latency. Quality and Speed of the Peer's connection also come into play.
This is all information that the torrent client has or can get easily. The client can monitor rolling averages for speed and do periodic latency tests. The client could also send the TTL it is sending with in the TCP packet so that the receiving client can calculate the distance.
You don't need to build an external database to look this stuff up.
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Because these companies have already messed with TTL, it is now broken for use
"Nearby peer" mechanisms are anticompetitive (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:"Nearby peer" mechanisms are anticompetitive (Score:5, Insightful)
Hot Potato for ISPs (Score:2)
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Re:Hot Potato for ISPs (Score:5, Insightful)
ISPs care about money - buying more upstream costs money, and upgrading peering links or internal distribution networks costs money. They also care about customer perceived performance, and if P2P uses their networks inefficiently, and swamps a neighborhood's upstream in ways that interfere with TCP performance, that's bad. For the most part, this technology will reduce their costs by reducing exterior bandwidth, and that's good, as long as it doesn't do it in ways that the improved P2P performance finds other bottlenecks in their system to step on. The better the P2P paths can match the structure of the ISP, the lower the impact on their network will be.
This approach doesn't actually require the ISP to install anything, or to do anything, or expose them to participating-in-P2P-themselves infringement conflicts; there are other approaches that do, such as putting P2P caching servers in their network. So it's pretty much all gravy for them, especially since they know that some large fraction of the bits they're carrying are P2P. (The Akamai caching servers here aren't being used to cache the P2P - they're web caches used by traditional content providers, and what this tool is doing is using their location to identify some of the structure of the ISP network to do better P2P peer matching.)
One way street, or no? (Score:3, Interesting)
What about the Comcast [slashdot.org] effect? Although a joint venture would seem to help both sides, the bottom line from the network/legal/politician/*AA side is [voice of James Hetfield] P2P BAAAAD! [/voice].
Any benefit for the user?? (Score:2)
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neighborhood pub (Score:1)
IPv6 multicast (Score:1)
Have a large file you want to distribute and want to do so using 2mbps of bandwidth? Pump the file in parallel using 1mbps, 512kbps, 256kbps, 128kbps, 64kbps and 32kbps so that people with all kinds of pipes can download it, and pump it in a loop. Add some amount of redundancy to each stream, and you are good to go.
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1) Cost efficiency. Is their current infrastructure IPv6 ready? Probably not.
2) A significant number of the peers would also need to be on IPv6. Chicken and egg problem.
3) P2P apps still need to know about IPv6 multicast, right?
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As I understand it, if ISPs enabled multicast their routers would explode due to the memory requirements.
Two seperate issues between ISPs and P2Ps (Score:5, Insightful)
The first issue is the amount of data (the bandwidth issue) that the P2P downloader is using relative to the amount of bandwidth that the other ISP users are consuming. The other issue is the ability of the so-called owners the downloaded information to legally extort money from P2P users.
The P2P users are the best customers of the ISPs. In time, the technology improves to handle the growing needs of the P2P community, and the P2P'ers are willing to pay (within reason) for faster access and greater bandwidth. P2P'ers will pay $30-$50 more a month to the ISPs than the dial-up'ers who are mostly checking e-mail, reading specialized websites, and doing eBay trading. This makes the P2P'ers a significant revenue source to the ISPs.
"Significant revenue source", in case you didn't know, is the most important three word phrase in the English language. "You're Under Arrest" is the second-most significant phrase in English. And, of course, the more 'sig rev source' that you have, the less you have to concern yourself with hearing "You're U A!" But, nevertheless, it can still happen. Especially in the current times of great change such as the present when one former source of sig revenue (the music industry) is evaporating and others like the P2P community are rising.
Generally the law follows the money. The golden rule states that he who hath the gold maketh the rule. But, in the real world, money and law tend to be 90 degrees out of phase. Situations arise where a disappearing revenue source has, for a certain period of time, the ability to envoke the legal system to extort money from people in greater proportion than its social usefullness would have it deserve. The music industry, and its extortion arm - the RIAA, is in that position. This industry is entering its 'zombie' phase, in that it is already dead but doesn't seem to know it. Death for a business is a different concept than it is in biology. Zombie businesses are basically unsustainable in the long run because their economic model has been broken, but their structures are still functioning. Basically the RIAA is just the music industry running around like a chicken with its head cut off. It can't last, but you don't want to be in its way before it just falls over.
Since the RIAA uses the ISPs to identify the P2P'ers that it has selected for random extortion, the P2P'ers don't trust the ISPs to come up with a working technical solution to the bandwidth problem. So we have the current situation that is bad for everyone. Personally I work around this by not downloading industry product: I get it in disc format from the local library and copy it from the disc onto my home PC. Then I return the disc to the library for the next person to use.
The music industry insists that this is illegal in their parallel universe. And, there was a time when it appeared that the RIAA was going to take on the US Library Association. But the librarians have been dealing with assholes like this for 300 years and have their arguments in order. It always come down to this point: yes, library users copy the most popular music recordings. Which does cut sales to a minor degree. But the 50,000 libraries buy (at full retail cost) one copy each of thousands of titles that wouldn't be selling 50,000 copies if the libraries weren't buying it. Basically, the library makes available music for people to copy. But the libraries pay off the music industry to ignore it. Everybody is happy.
The P2P'ers need to adopt this model for distribution. They should find out who they are in their local areas, like a university, and then trade physical copies of the materials that they are interested in. Like having ALL the recent music of particular genre or favorite films on a single USB 500Gi
Re:Two seperate issues between ISPs and P2Ps (Score:4, Insightful)
The best customers of the ISPs are "dial-up'ers who are mostly checking e-mail, reading specialized websites, and doing eBay trading" AND "pay $30-$50 more a month to the ISPs".
ISPs hate the traditional bandwidth hog and now they're starting to hate their traditional customers too, because those "dial-up'ers" on broadband are also moving towards bandwidth heavy internet habits.
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Wrong: just about everyone on slashdot who gets moderated past +3 talks like this. And it is not the way the world works. It's close, but there exist subtle and important distinctions between your parallel universe and the one you're living in.
The biggest distinction is that we reward riches, because riches are a rew
Bizarre (Score:2)
I challenge you to write stuff on Slashdot that is more bizarre than anything that I can write. It's hard at first, but, like all things worth doing, it gets easier with practice. A touch of advice? Get a speech-to-text program and a microphone. That way you won't be limited by your typing skills. Ran
Um, I don't get it (Score:2)
If the ISPs' claims are correct, what would make them happy would be P2P software that throttles itself to a very low transfer rate. The longer it takes me to download (or upload) a file, the less bandwidth I'm using at any given time, and the happier t
Re:Paranoia (Score:4, Informative)
The FBI may or may not come after you for uploading, but they will NOT come after you for downloading.
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"Lifestyle" is linked to uncyclopedia's entry on "your mom", making an obvious joke to anyone who's read HHGTTG (which is mentioned in the second sentence). Now, if a small snippet of a song infringes Sony-BMG's copyright on its rootkit-infested garbage, then I just infringed on the late Mr. Adams' copyright. How is that different from a small snippet of a file, except that what I w
Paranoia Survivor MAX (Score:2)
Plus, when I'm trying to download the .shn file of The Station's live performance of The Fog (written and performed by them) using bittorrent rather than the slower DL from archive.org, how would I know that I didn't download Radiohead's completely different song of the same name?
Likewise, when I'm trying to download the .shn file of the late George Harrison's performance of "My Sweet Lord" (written and performed by him) using bittorrent rather than the slower HTTP download, how would I know that I didn't download The Chiffons' completely different song of the same melody [vwh.net]?
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None of the damned P2P clients is going to return that Chiffons song for "My Sweet Lord" unless so
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As far as I can tell, this is one of those urban legends which follows similar lines to the, "You can download this, but you have to delete it in 24 hours or buy it legally." There's no precedent for that, either, but it propagated for several years on the web.
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Copyright in the US was originally To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries [cornell.edu]. It protects the author against publishers.
When you upload, you are publishing. The RIAA is creating the urban legend, which is that downloading is illegal. Rather than ask for a citation saying it i
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The RIAA Is playing games with spin, though. They and the media claim that downloaders are being sued, when in fact it's uploaders who are being sued. Originally, th
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Fair use, per copyright law. If copying for your own personal us is infringement, then please point to the statute that says so.
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There are several tests for fair use. Just passing one test may not be (and in many cases is not) enough to label an instance of copying as fair use of the work.
In fact, reading up on fair use, "personal use" isn't listed at all. Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. Â 107 states:
In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:
1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Copying an entir
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You are attempting to prove a point to me. I cannot prove a negative. The onus is on you.
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Sorry, but US Copyright law )and that of most every nation on earth) is horribly broken. Assuming it's not Creative Commons or otherwise authorized, downloading an MP3 is indeed illegal. By downloading you are "creating a copy", and violating copyright law.
In fact it is a violation of law even if if you had no reason to suspect it was an infringement, a violation of law even if you had no particular intent to get that particular file, a violation of law e
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I agree that copyright is horribly broken. Terms are way too long (twenty years, as in days past, would be about right IMO) and the statute should clearly state that non-commercial use of any kine (even distribution) is not infringing.
Oh, and that god-awful DMCA needs to be repealed.
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Ok, I glossed over that simple part with just the statement "By downloading you are "creating a copy", and violating copyright law". The basis for that is:
Title 17 Section 106 Exclusive rights in copyrighted works [cornell.edu]
Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
etc.
When you save a copy, yo