Media terminology gripe
2003-09-09 08:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mdlbearToday NPR is reporting on the RIAA's filing of hundreds of lawsuits against people who have been "illegally downloading music". This use of the word "downloading" is, of course, what the RIAA wants them to say: it will scare people away from downloading music, even when it's legal.
What they're actually doing, of course, is suing people who have been sharing music -- allowing others to download. While it's true that most P2P programs default to sharing the files you've downloaded, it's always possible to turn this off. It's greedy, it's antisocial, but it's safe -- at least until the RIAA does start going after the people who only download and don't share.
The RIAA, MPAA, et. al. would like nothing better than to make "peer-to-peer file sharing software" illegal, and have recently tried to associate it with pornography. Allow me to point out that Windows ships with a perfectly good file-sharing protocol (CIFS) -- it would be stupid to allow SMB packets through your firewall, but you could do it easily and, until Windows XP, Windows was set up to do it by default. Let me also point out that HTTP is another perfectly good filesharing protocol; just run a web server on your desktop machine and you're a "peer" on the network.
The old regime would like nothing better than to turn the Internet into another one-way medium, with a small number of tightly-controlled information sources ("content providers") broadcasting to a vast audience of consumers. They may even succeed for a while; many broadband providers have a provision against running servers, and some enforce it by blocking incoming requests. But TCP/IP is fundamentally a peer-to-peer protocol; any machine capable of receiving information is also capable of sending it.
What they're actually doing, of course, is suing people who have been sharing music -- allowing others to download. While it's true that most P2P programs default to sharing the files you've downloaded, it's always possible to turn this off. It's greedy, it's antisocial, but it's safe -- at least until the RIAA does start going after the people who only download and don't share.
The RIAA, MPAA, et. al. would like nothing better than to make "peer-to-peer file sharing software" illegal, and have recently tried to associate it with pornography. Allow me to point out that Windows ships with a perfectly good file-sharing protocol (CIFS) -- it would be stupid to allow SMB packets through your firewall, but you could do it easily and, until Windows XP, Windows was set up to do it by default. Let me also point out that HTTP is another perfectly good filesharing protocol; just run a web server on your desktop machine and you're a "peer" on the network.
The old regime would like nothing better than to turn the Internet into another one-way medium, with a small number of tightly-controlled information sources ("content providers") broadcasting to a vast audience of consumers. They may even succeed for a while; many broadband providers have a provision against running servers, and some enforce it by blocking incoming requests. But TCP/IP is fundamentally a peer-to-peer protocol; any machine capable of receiving information is also capable of sending it.
