Tuesday, June 28, 2005

SCOTUS and P2P

In the wake of yesterday's SCOTUS decision re: file sharing programs, I expect we'll see tightening of all kinds of laws regarding the distribution networks involved in p2p and the way they're marketed.

To be clear: I don't uses p2p and never have, though I sometimes ask people to find hard-to-locate stuff for me. In that case, I'm using BlakNo1's perfectly legitimate (in my opinion) defense: if what I like is kind of obscure and the corporations which control legal access to media have deemed it not profitable enough to reproduce, well, I'm going to find it somewhere. I'd like to see p2p companies do a real analysis of what their programs are used for: I'll bet it's not so much for the girl of the month and more for stuff the mall doesn't stock. But then I'm an idealist, I guess.

I mostly get songs sent to me, by like-minded friends and often by artists I've befriended. The latter category is presumably legitimate, but the former has to be "theft" in the strictest interpretation of the law. But then I burn CDs for friends too, which I guess is also verboten.

I suspect P2P wouldn't be much of a big deal if CD burners hadn't become affordable, but once those files could be burned and reproduced in other media or plopped onto mp3 players, the industry had an issue.

Do you use p2p? What for?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

me, I use soulseek (slsknet.org) but mainly for recommendations. since the bands I like are rarely, if ever, played on the radio, even on the left end of the dial. since p2p I've gone from 15-20 CD purchases a year to 10-15 a month on average, and lots more live shows.