Study Estimates P2P Copyright Infringement
02/02/10 at 5:46 pm Pete 1 comment
This report at Ars Technica is somewhat dated but potentially relevant to an earlier discussion we posted re: net neutrality and unlawful content.
Entry filed under: Internet News & Trends. Tags: .
1. Scott Morizot | 02/03/10 at 11:15 am
And I’ll point out that the survey in question deals only with those torrents identified through the Mainline trackerless DHT plugin. Discussing the amount of unlawful content in a particular system has little relevance in a discussion about whether or not it’s appropriate to block (or try to block) an entire *protocol*.
I mentioned linux distributions (which by and large run their own torrents — don’t know if they show up in Mainline or not). But that’s hardly the only such example. Blizzard, for example, distributes updates to WoW and other games using an updater that employs a hybrid approach, but which does rely heavily on the bittorrent protocol. I know. I pay blizzard a monthly subscription for WoW and would be pretty irritated if my ISP implemented a form of “network management” that degraded or blocked a service that I and millions of others pay to use.
If net neutrality regulations don’t consider such situations and make such distinctions, then they will be essentially useless.