Why I'm against P2P legislation
Oct. 17th, 2004 10:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewduckerI know many people who are against the current copyright legislation and its recent expansion. The RIAA, BPI, MPAA, FAST and many other representative organisations have been furiously lobbying for draconian regulations to protect their interests and prevent ordinary people from copying movies, music, software, etc. Like many others I view this as a bad thing. Unlike many others, my reasons for doing so are largely technical.
I don't actually give a damn if people are forced to buy music. I don't like the system particularly, but if there was uncrackable encryption tomorrow I wouldn't cry into my cornflakes. I pay £10 a month for my Napster subscription as it is, and I don't object to paying money to those people who made the music possible in the first place. It's not a perfect system, but it actually seemed to work pretty well until the turn of the century.
The reason I object is that copying files is too damn easy. Writing a P2P file-copying program is trivial for anyone with a decent knowledge of how the internet works. One program listens for incoming connections, another opens a connection and sends a stream of data, while the first one writes that data to a new file. Ta-da! File sent. You _cannot_ stop people writing trivially simple file-sharing software without crippling computers to the point where they are not worth having.
It's the equivalent of outlawing trees because pointy sticks can be used to hurt people - the damage done in attempting to prevent the spread of pointy sticks _vastly_ outweighs the amount of harm caused by pointy-stick wielders. Outlawing nuclear missiles is easy - producing them takes so much effort that preventing their creation is a comprehensible task. Preventing the creation of software that's trivially simple is just not possible without taking away people's computers and replacing them with games consoles.
Unless you want to live in a world where people don't have access to flexible computers, because they might do something bad with them, you won't support these laws either. And you'll realise that these laws aren't just wrong, they're downright silly - no more plausible than banning people from thinking about sex, and likely to have as much effect.
I don't actually give a damn if people are forced to buy music. I don't like the system particularly, but if there was uncrackable encryption tomorrow I wouldn't cry into my cornflakes. I pay £10 a month for my Napster subscription as it is, and I don't object to paying money to those people who made the music possible in the first place. It's not a perfect system, but it actually seemed to work pretty well until the turn of the century.
The reason I object is that copying files is too damn easy. Writing a P2P file-copying program is trivial for anyone with a decent knowledge of how the internet works. One program listens for incoming connections, another opens a connection and sends a stream of data, while the first one writes that data to a new file. Ta-da! File sent. You _cannot_ stop people writing trivially simple file-sharing software without crippling computers to the point where they are not worth having.
It's the equivalent of outlawing trees because pointy sticks can be used to hurt people - the damage done in attempting to prevent the spread of pointy sticks _vastly_ outweighs the amount of harm caused by pointy-stick wielders. Outlawing nuclear missiles is easy - producing them takes so much effort that preventing their creation is a comprehensible task. Preventing the creation of software that's trivially simple is just not possible without taking away people's computers and replacing them with games consoles.
Unless you want to live in a world where people don't have access to flexible computers, because they might do something bad with them, you won't support these laws either. And you'll realise that these laws aren't just wrong, they're downright silly - no more plausible than banning people from thinking about sex, and likely to have as much effect.
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no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 02:22 pm (UTC)It seems that banning things people think everyone should have just makes the demand that much more. Like banning cigarettes in prison, and watching the hard drug smuggling dry up - people start smuggling in tobacco instead. But CDs are much more convenient to have, and if it weren't for the high prices (especially compared to cassettes, which cost more to make, and DVDs, which cost about the same and pack more information), I'd buy more of them. In fact, Walmart is pressing the music industry to lower CD prices so that it can sell them for $10 a pop without losing as much money as they are now.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 02:31 pm (UTC)I refer you to the teachings of the Catholic Church, amongst other. Just because banning something is implausible and unworkable, dosn't mean that it's unlikely to be suggested or indeed imposed. You just need the right idiot in the right place. The only comfort is that it won't work.
Actually, from the point of view of historical study it's quite useful. If laws are repeatedly passed banning something it's a safe bet that a lot of people are doing it. They don't ban things no-one does, usually.