Ok so i wasnt going to do this but Ive been thinking about the whole P2P thing all week since reading this article. Lets take a moment now and discuss a few of the finer points of P2P shall we?

Ok so we all know that yes people use P2P networks to pirate music, movies and software but its used for so much more. A lot of people use it to get free and open source content that would be otherwise inaccessible. One good example would be a copy of a Linux distribution. Fedora for example weighs in at well over 3 gigs in size. Wouldnt that be fun to download directly from a server? Wouldnt that be so much fun for the people paying to host said server? I mean how many people actually download this stuff right? It couldnt possibly raise bandwith costs that much could it?

Yes. Yes it can.

Now P2P technology is used in so many places these days it goes almost unnoticed. Most people may have realised by now that if they play any form of massively multiplayer online game their updates and patches are usually supplied via a torrent system of one shape or another. This is all to help keep the bandwith costs as low as possible.

Lets work off numbers here for a moment shall we? Lets say you play WoW (World of Warcraft). Imagine that every single update they released for download was downloaded by 4 million people. (Dont comment talking about their official numbers as those figures usually include players that played for a few minutes and never logged on again). Now i dont want to even try to guess at the size of all the updates at once so lets just say a nice small figure for arguements sake. Say those 4 million people downloaded the updates for a month and the months updates came to 20 megs. Thats 80 million megs or  78125 gigs. or 76.293945312 TB. Thats an awful lot of bandwith spent on just updates never mind the costs of runing the actual game.

Now thats a couple good examples of P2P being a good thing. Now many groups have embraced the P2P technologies in varying degrees which is to my mind a very good thing indeed. After all it not only reduces their costs but allows them to free up money for other ventures that may benefit us (Id like to say it will cause prices to be lowered but then you would only call me either a liar or an idiot).

If every ISp though decided to implement a P2P filtering technology of some form then would those of us downloading open source material or updates to software we legally purchased have to suffer? Even if those packages that legally use P2P technologies arent targetted it merely offers pirates a wide range of alternatives to choose from as far as encryption goes. Why simply make it look like your running a WoW update while youre downloading the latest movie release.

The problem is that people will find some way of pirating music, movies and software no matter what hapens. Its human nature to want to absorb information such as the content of these items and it will continue unabated even if every ISP is filtered. A new technology will come forth and we will be right back where we started.

The true way to go isnt filtering and certainly isnt suing. The way forward is by embracing the new technologies as some companies have begun to do. Of course as yet the number of those companies is far too few to make any visible difference. If you own one of the companies that thinks its losing out to P2P try to find a way to monetise the number of downloads that go to P2P and you will be set for life. After all suing can be a double edged sword. Example