January 6, 2004
Looking Beyond the Pew Report and The Present
Read through Frank’s links about the Pew Report on P2P downloading. A couple of thoughts I haven’t seen elsewhere
1. What about services like Earthstation 5, and Morpheus with its proxy servers, and other similar services with privacy enhancing features that were left out of the report? For those who are still sharing, which services are they using? Will we have a similar effect to when Napster was shut down? First only some migrated to the new services, and then word quickly spread and all Napster users moved over. Could there just be a lag in adopting these other services?
2. Does the RIAA have a target number in mind? What level of piracy would be tolerable? Is one in seven good enough? If we reach the target, what will happen with DRM? If infringement is stalled to a tolerable degree clearly because of the lawsuits, then what need is there to pursue DRM, regardless of whether you see it as a futile solution?
3. Will the effect last? If people actually have been scared off now, would a lapse in lawsuits perhaps lead to some sharing again? A related question: if the Verizon decision leads to fewer lawsuits, particularly over the longer term, will people respond to that?
Filed by Derek Slater at 8:20 pm under General news
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The first rule of darknets is not to tell any outsiders about it. Including pollsters.