BitTorrent + INDUCE Act + Linspire 5.0

[Jonathan Hutchins]

On Monday 11 October 2004 11:45 am, Frank Wiles wrote:

>   What I'm saying is that while Bittorrent is by definition P2P, the
>   others you listed are not.  

How do you define P2P? It means Peer to peer, implies transferring files from 
one system to a similarly used system, usually Personal Computer to Personal 
Computer.  All of the methods we've discussed here can be used for that.

The only special things about bittorrent are that it's been optimized to 
transfer files that seem to be particularly large compared to the current 
capacity of the systems involved.  Having seen software and file sizes evolve 
from primitive systems where 64 Kilobytes was a lot of space and 54 baud was 
fast, I can assure you that bittorrent is only an incremental step up from 
something like zmodem, which also treated a "large" file transfer as 
individual packets in order to optimize the stream.

It's not that I don't "get" the distinction that places systems like 
bittorrent or napster into a special, new category of file sharing, it's that 
I think the distinction is entirely bogus.

FIDOnet saw some similar accusations in it's day - mainly that it was used for 
distributing pirated software.  Sure, it was one method of distribution, but 
that was not it's purpose, and there was nothing particular about FIDOnet 
itself that caused people to pirate software.

Legislating against innovations in software is one of the stupidest things you 
can do.  It's not going to solve anybody's problems, and it's not going to 
prevent anything except casual use by the techonoligically naieve.