Banjooie, your posts in last 2 threads were similar enough to ad hominem. Instead of discussing the topic and its merits, you wrote stuff along the lines "
it's posted by b0rsuk, so he means X Y Z"
. I don't need to put up with it.
Banning or interfering with P2P in any way just because it can be used for pirating is silly. Not only not all of it is file sharing, but also some artists are very happy that their music is shared. In some cases musicians were angry because RIAA acted in their name, without being asked to. Some say that they don't earn much/anything from cds anyway, and they need extra publicity to attract people to concerts.
And people also share stuff that's perfectly legal.
If we just allow that, they will keep banning any new protocol/app that can be used in illegal file sharing. Many ISP's limit bittorent, for example. It's frequently used for distribution of game patches and other legal stuff, video "
pamphlets"
, interviews, books that are no longer covered by copyrights... Also, anything covered by GPL, BSD, or one of Creative Commons licences is meant to be shared freely.
Blocking P2P = carpet bombing.
Speaking of servers going down:
Ars Technica wrote:
Customers who have purchased music from Microsoft's now-defunct MSN Music store are now facing a decision they never anticipated making: commit to which computers (and OS) they want to authorize forever, or give up access to the music they paid for. Why? Because Microsoft has decided that it's done supporting the service and will be turning off the MSN Music license servers by the end of this summer.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080422-drm-sucks-redux-microsoft-to-nuke-msn-music-drm-keys.html
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http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20051128/adams_01.shtml
[Last edited by b0rsuk at 05-08-2008 10:17 PM]