It never ceases to amaze me how companies (well, companies) such as this seem to think they have a case. They don’t. It’s amazing these things even manage to get into court.
I’m not saying that there’s no legitimate use for peer-to-peer services. (only the name, peer-to-peer…please…as if this is something new…Think back to the windows 3.11 days and tell me this is not a step back for computing…) There is. Yes, you can sample music before you buy it. Yes, it can save bandwidth for distributing large files such as when the recent xp sp2 went gold.
However, let’s not kid ourselves. When you download xp sp2 from an official source there is something wrong with you. Likewise for the latest linux iso’s of your favourite distribution. They are not trusted sources. And sampling music can be done in a numer of ways that do not need peer-to-peer networks. But, most of all, let’s be honest here: is not 99 percent of peer-to-peer traffic, in fact, illegal?
So, the situation was: record companies did not much mind mp3 sharing and such before napster and friends. They did not even notice. Now they are on a witch hunt. And, if you ask me, it’s because a lot of people seemed to insist they had a right to distribute their music online. (quote: “But I paid for it, I can do anything I want with it”).
If you have something you should not have, but it’s on such a small scale nobody really minds, you should accept it as-is. Otherwise you might well lose it, and give up some more rights indirectly.
Somehow, people seem to think they have several ‘rights’, especially when it comes to computing.
Q: Why do you want to have an internet connection?
A: Because then I can get free music.
Q: why did you just send an e-mail to 20 people with a picture of you cat in 2000 by 1600 resolution, and in uncompressed bitmap format at that?
A: It came out of my camera that way.
Q: why do you not learn something, if only a bare minimum, about your computer?
A: I don’t care. Just fix it.
Yes, everybody has a right to be ‘on the internet’. but getting free music is not a right. it is something you do ‘on the side’, and if it does not work, too bad.
If you buy a VCR, do you take it back to the shop demanding that all round buttons on the front are replaced by square ones because that fits in better with your living-room? No, that would be idiotic. So why oh why do people persist in maintaining that attitude with their computers?
In short, if services like kazaa and friends, together with their most vocal supporters, had not shouted out aloud that they need to exist, need to make money (with a non-existing business model I might add) and have a right to do anything at all, we would be a lot better off now. Because file swapping would still be in the hands of the capable few. And anybody can become one of the capable if only they are willing to learn a minimal amount of info which is readily available.
Maybe a consomer pc should not be a pc at all but a thin client? Of course, such attempts will probably fail because people will not be able to work around the legal issues by downloading patches, firmware and spyware-ridden kazaa.
