Psychology plays the biggest part in all of this. It’s how you perceive the fundamental properties behind file sharing I think that ultimately determines much of your political position on the subject. Do you feel you're getting things "off the internet", impersonally, free, i.e. "scoring swag off the man" (the RIAA’s position), or do you feel you're getting your files from another individual person much like yourself in an intimate if highly virtual pas de deux?
I feel it’s the latter for me and actually that’s how the network of P2Ps really function. "The Internet" isn't sitting around waiting to cough up the latest image or sound arbitrarily to anyone who stumbles over it, but rather someone somewhere has made the effort and taken the time to become an amateur administrator and allow access to their database for no particular reason at all except a need to share and be a part of this amazing community (that word again). This fact becomes all the more apparent when you find out it’s easier to “score swag” without sharing anything at all (each time I test a new network I start with an empty folder and I’ve never been called out or blocked for leeching, not once in over three years). Obviously if we leeched all the time we’d have to go back to getting our things from central servers in some kind of an awful twilight-like AOL experience where all was controlled by an unseen presence and we ourselves reduced to barely autonomous consumers. But that is not Peer-To-Peer, nor has it ever been.
As for issues surrounding the programs that we use to facilitate our file transfers, how we pay for them and other areas of compensation, such as laws concerning “uploads” etc, well, ultimately it is up to us to determine whether we govern ourselves or allow someone else to do so for us. Or to us. Indeed, that's what this board is about isn’t it. In matters peer-to-peer, where we’re going, how we’re getting there and most importantly, who’s driving?
- js.
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