Assorted Afflatuses
A Bit of Sanity
In another blow to corporate America, it looks as if the FCC may force sneaky ISPs to disclose the true speed of their Internet access and the restrictions they put on that access. Never have I heard of a customer receiving the "potential maximum possible" speed cited in ISP advertisements. Most people celebrate when their access moves at even half of the promised speed.
More importantly, though, it is essential that customers know which types of network traffic their ISPs either retard or stop altogether. Peer-to-peer file sharing systems, such as BitTorrent, have a bad reputation for allowing unscrupulous people to trade music without a penny going to the artist whose blood and sweat produced the work. In reality, they have the potential to make the Internet much more efficient, and allow innovators to make the Internet even more useful and powerful. Many people use peer-to-peer technology in completely legitimate ways.
The VCR too can be used to violate the intellectual property rights of a television studio or some other such organization. Yet, fortunately for consumers, the Supreme Court ruled that the Sony Corporation could continue selling the VCR because so many completely legitimate uses exist. I find it quite saddening that our nation's lawmakers has become so obsequious to their financial backers that peer-to-peer technology has suffered the opposite fate.
If consumers know their service provider prohibits their legitimate use of technologies with a plethora of legitimate legal uses, they can abandon those tyrannical providers. With any luck, those backward-thinking providers will, through the power of competition, be forced to open their lines to the use of powerful technologies with a potential for illegitimate use.
Cynics take note! Martha Stewart's kitchen is not the sole province of good things.
The thing about BitTorrent and similar technologies is that the illegal uses far outweigh the legal ones. Most people that use these technologies use it only to illegally download copyrighted music, movies, TV shows, and software, rather than share non-copyrighted materials. Those that only use it for legitimate uses are a very small minority. With VCR's, however, it seems the legitimate uses outweigh the illegal ones, at least in my perception. More people record TV shows than illegally copy movies.
Also, what should consumers do to protest this? Are there any ISP's of decent speed that do not restrict BitTorrent traffic? And if there was one that did and advertised as such, I'd imagine that it would be overloaded with BitTorrent traffic, indeed at the expense of legal Internet activities.
First, I would point out that, if you read the Supreme Court's ruling, it states something like "a strong potential for non-illegitimate uses," as the reason the VCR was not outlawed. I would agree that much of the traffic on p2p networks is illegal, but many people, myself included, use it to download completely legitimate content. I don't think it's possible to argue that no strong potential for legal uses exists.
Whether or not some of that traffic breaks the law also depends greatly upon what use of digital content constitutes fair use, or legal use. Back in the 70's, the movie and television companies argued that taping an episode of some TV show did not constitute fair use: it was their copyrighted content and, with fast forward, it was possible to, in a sense, deprive them of revenue. But it was decided that taping an episode of Battlebots is within a person's fair use rights, provided they have a legal way of receiving that content via airwaves, cable, satellite or what have you.
Of course, the question of fair use is mirky with digital technologies. It's now possible to make an identical copy of something with a computer. But, at the same time, a digital music file, for example, is a non-rivalrous resource. My having a copy does not mean someone else cannot have one, in the sense that, if I take a seat on a subway, then someone necessarily cannot have a seat.
Second, most ISPs do not restrict traffic in any way. And I'm not saying that ISPs should not have the ability to restrict how much people can transfer, but rather that they should not have the ability to restrict what flows through their network. In fact, I think many European ISPs have the right idea: they charge not only based on the speed of connection offered, but also regulate the amount of bandwidth customers use in a month. That seems like a much more sensible solution.