Politicians Can’t Stop Peer-2-Peer, Nor Should They Try

[JackSpratts]

By Joseph Lonsdale
Special to United Press International
From the Business & Economics Desk

PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct. 10 (UPI) -- Here in Silicon Valley, we shake our heads in dismay whenever a politician grabs hold of a new idea for regulating technology and the Internet.

These politicians are unlike the typical computer science professor, who will hesitate to offer fashion advice to his students, admitting he has no idea what an earth color is, or why he gets funny looks for wearing his brown and green corduroy jacket with a bright pink shirt.

Unfortunately, the typical politicians in Washington appear eager to lend their minds -- and their backing -- to aid an unholy trinity: the Business Software Alliance (BSA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

Using decentralized programs that communicate on a computer-to-computer level, millions of Internet users are exchanging legally traded material along with everything from the hottest new songs at near-CD quality to high-quality, full-length, commercial-free versions of their favorite television shows.

Technology has yielded a new environment in terms of information exchange, and great change is inevitable on the business horizon -- change that will restructure several well-entrenched industries. Of course, these industries do not want to be slimmed and remade into a more efficient economic role ... and they are willing to use the government's guns to fight the transformation. If the 19th century's candle-making guilds had had over $20 billion of industry behind them, who knows how many lawyers it might have taken to change a light bulb?

Without delving into technical details, the basic idea which the political class does not seem to grasp is that without destroying the Internet as we know it, it is not feasible to prevent the exchange of information on a peer-to-peer (p2p) level. It is possible to stop certain schemes of information exchange and drive the "pirates" further underground into more elaborate and less detectable realms, but in the end, p2p systems will prove even harder to thwart than drug trafficking.
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=...0-030328-9838r

- js.