Digital Rights Management & Privacy

Hi Folks

I know this is a hot topic for many and has implications for all internet users.

No "new policy position" is taken by raising this discussion.
WTT continues to refuse to provide direct "how-to" assistance for use of P2P clients. (A policy I heartily support)

This linked article provides good "news reporting with limited editorialization" which is a refreshing way to receive information in my opinion.
http://windowssecrets.com/comp/090507/ ISPs assist in cutting off file-sharing users

P2P consumes huge amounts of internet access bandwidth, possibly affecting us all.
SPAM still probably consumes more and may be a greater threat to smooth and speedy access overall.

Dire predictions of internet traffic jams and failure back to dial-up speeds has long been predicted.
Running out of IP addresses was thought to be a possibility prior to IPV6.
Now new predictions are pointing at new problems arising as early as 2012 due to steadily increasing numbers of users world-wide.

But P2P raises issues of contention about the ownership and fair use of purchased media.

What are your thoughts and opinions about P2P and both business-based and legal-based actions to restrict?

DRM will never be a success- for three reasons:

1) Any widely distributed object will be available to a fraction of users in a form that permits copying.
2) Users will copy objects if it is possible and interesting to do so.
3) Users are connected by high-bandwidth channels.

We speculate that there will be short-term impediments to the effectiveness of the darknet as a distribution mechanism, but ultimately the darknet-genie will not be put back into the bottle.

Paper by several MS engineers from 2002

http://crypto.stanford.edu/DRM2002/darknet5.doc

Hey Shelf Life, Do you think that ISP account caps will have an impact on ability of P2P to continue? If P2P continues unfettered, is the entire Internet at risk of brown-outs and traffic jams? Do you see other developments, maybe including the increasing number of Internet subscriber users leading to brown-out? Are you aware of any major Internet infrastructure in developmental phases soon to be put online? Will there be a dual-tier internet with home and small business users suffering more of the slow-down/brown-outs?

hi Doug, p2p traffic accounts for alot of bandwidth but with more and more streaming media and web based content delivery to computers the bandwidth issue will get worse. the days of a isp offering "unlimited bandwidth" are pretty much over. Isps are rolling out bandwidths caps (which they always had) tiered services or interfering with targeted p2p traffic. Rather than over selling subscriptions and limiting or interfering with your packets they should, as any business be adding infrastructure to handle the increase, problem is that would cost money, so now we will limit your bandwidth.

The laws aren't the only things getting tougher — so are the downloaders. Predictably, P2P users are employing technology to fight technology, creating an arms race between file-sharers and the recording industry.

Listen, I'm not promoting illegal file sharing, but it also makes me mad that we are not being protected, as users, from privacy concerns.

The above quote sheds light on what it will always be like. Every time there is a new technology to "thwart" the would be pirate, a newer technology comes along and breaks it.

There is something simple to say about this, there can, and will be, technology put in place that will always defeat the billions of dollars that copyright holders, ISPs, and other interested parties may poor into preventing piracy. Relatively speaking, you have a handful of people working on preventing piracy with their limited knowledge, and you have a pool of millions of people (through open source) working on defeating it. The piracy is OPEN, the prevention is CLOSED.

Ultimately, P2P traffic will all be encrypted on the fly, will use random ports, and will masquerade itself as normal web traffic and anonymize itself. Good luck identifying it or holding anybody accountable for what you can't prove.

What is ridiculous is that song writers, singers, actors, producers, and other executives can't live on less than millions of dollars a year. How about making some laws limiting the amount of money they can charge for purchased or viewed media. Voila, problem solved. Now, nobody will care. Same thing they need to do with the medical system, although I don't see anybody pirating a heart or a kidney, and holding a doctor at gun point to install it.

Landmark study: DRM truly does make pirates out of us all

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/20…t-of-us-all.ars

Listen, I'm not promoting illegal file sharing, but it also makes me mad that we are not being protected, as users, from privacy concerns

Amen!