P2P Manifesto

[TankGirl]

Check this P2P Manifesto from Marco Montemagno, an Italian new media expert. I think he captures very well the current development trends and his projection of the near future is close to my own projection. Here are some quotes:

About media business:

Media business – same of all the other businesses - will have to front an highly interconnected future, made of social networks, instantaneous multidimensional, multiplatform, delocalized, communications.

About our shared future:

The first unavoidable step will be that file sharing will evolve to social sharing, a context in which the exchange of data it will comprise hundred of other sort of data exchange (contacts, bookmarks, jobs data, etc).

With social sharing it will not be more imaginable to limit the sharing of data, audio or video, drown as they will be inside of other data and macro structures of data.

It will not be possible anymore to control the data exchange, in an atmosphere made of billions of exchanges every minute, everywhere and of any type (also with mesh networking technologies and similar).

Tracking the sharing will become impossible, because will exist not only the web; a multitude of different devices will be the Net and part of the Net, in the same time.

P2P will move towards a shape of “PnetP”, where it will be integrated into wider data sharing, inside more and more structured social networks.

About 'networkers':

Will emerge a new figure: “file networkers”.

File networkers will be all the persons able to create social networks - as an example - musical, constituted from thousands of contacts, endorsements and connections.

The number and the quality of the contacts will decide the hierarchy of file networkers.

File networkers will become an important media business authority, the expert prompter; the unreplaceable guide in order to find the way, among the infinity of available contents.

To have the best file networkers, will be the challenge of the PnetP market of tomorrow.

The swappers of today will become the most wanted “file networkers”, paradoxically, the most desired allied of the Majors.

How many files are you able to share?

With who?

Which quality?

How fast?

The information that today characterize a "criminal", tomorrow will characterize the "go to guy" of Media business.

Create wide and authoritative artistic social networks, through which spread their own jobs, will be one of the main challenges that the Artists and the Majors will have to face.

There are some feedback posts in his blog following the manifesto, and you can find a good in-depth review by Robin Good here.

- tg

[theknife]

saw this article on Slashdot....the author Marco has a touch of that starry-eyed, open-source, information-wants-to-be-free thing going and they roasted him for it, as well for his methodology, writing ability, conclusions, and anything else they could think of. but Slashdot is kind of a tough crowd anyway, no?

some good stuff in it, nonetheless

somebody on /. referenced this MS-backed study of p2p and darknet technologies in the same thread - it's an interesting read and you gotta love the conclusion:

There seem to be no technical impediments to darknet-based peer-to-peer file sharing technologies growing in convenience, aggregate bandwidth and efficiency. The legal future of darknet-technologies is less certain, but we believe that, at least for some classes of user, and possibly for the population at large, efficient darknets will exist.

[JackSpratts]

Originally Posted by theknife

Slashdot is kind of a tough crowd anyway, no?

i'm always fascinated by the (barely contained) nonsensical rage directed at file-sharers by certain segments of the blogshere, those high-grounders equating swapping with stealing, and swappers with immorality. none too subtle comments like "i'm sorry if i want to actually get paid for my labors!" seem to imply there are legions of starving software, record and movie company execs and creators filling welfare offices on an unheard of global scale, all because we're trading media with each other. that is of course a lie. anger and dogma aside, with album sales up two percent this year in the us, theater ticket sales up and dvd sales continuing to skyrocket, and some of the wealthiest companies in the world selling software, the facts are strikingly different. not that they let that interfere with their propagandizing, but we shouldn’t take it any more seriously than other mythological musings. still, if you have to hear real sob stories take a look at some of the physical goods manufacturers, like car companies, or entities like rubbermaid, once one of the most respected organizations in the world, now bankrupt, it's employees watching listlessly as auctioneers sell off it's physical carcass. not a victim of ip theft among them but doa as doa can be. globalization a culprit perhaps, but with the copyright cops some of the biggest boosters of globaliztion on the um globe, don’t expect them to highlight that connection.

you’d think after five years of “out-of-control” file-sharing (they should watch somebody who’s good at it like me. i’m very in-control lol) people might realize the so-called “intellectual property” world hasn’t come to end, far from it. you can still profitably sell books and dvds and software, people still watch commercials on tv (ask somebody if they’ve seen a good one lately) and artists still collect royalties on compositions, which was called the “biggest threat” created by p2p “sure, musicians might get paid for performing even if they can’t sell records, but how are the poor songwriters going to survive?” since you've asked, very well thanks. bmi, the songwriters’ big collection society saw revenues rise 9 percent.

slashdot is fine as far as it goes, and i’ve seen wonderful things there i probably wouldn’t have caught otherwise, but there does seem to be a misanthropic contingent waiting to pounce on anything even remotely p2p-positive, regardless of the facts or the benefits. their peculiar form of moderation-by-mob may or may not encourage trolling and sloppiness, but it wouldn’t hurt if the anti-swapping contingent buttressed their rants with some actual facts, and moved the hysterics out of the realms of fantasy into something approaching empirical intellectual discourse.

- js.