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Music lawyer Chris Castle, who was part of PFF's recent panel on The Role of Music Licensing in a Digital Age, explains Why You Hate Net Neutrality If You Love Copyright, in Music News.
He notes that a P2P application such as BitTorrent is:
an extraordinary bandwidth hog because the “overhead” required to keep it running is exponential to the number of connections and the speed of those connections on the peer-to-peer network. . . . . Some have estimated it is as high as 90%, and one would have to assume that nearly all of this traffic is illegal. The effect is described by an ISP rep to whom Castle links:
While we are located in a college town, only about 1/3 of our clients are college students. (This is because the University provides them with subsidized Internet access if they live off campus, or practically free access -- via the government-funded Internet2 no less -- if they live in the dormitories.) Yet, about 2/3 of our traffic is demonstrably P2P: Kazaa, BitTorrent, etc. And this is a conservative estimate; it's only what our patterns detect. One student, without bandwidth restrictions, could easily soak up 10 Mbps of continuous backbone bandwidth, which in our location can cost as much as $6,000 per month wholesale.
That's why we were among the first ISPs to implement P2P mitigation. Had we not done so, those users -- perhaps unwittingly, because many of them did not realize that they were transmitting as well as receiving illegal copies of music -- would have choked off those engaged in legitimate activities and we would have lost their business. Many P2P applications, upon discovering an unfettered fast "pipe," quickly make the computers on which they're running major hubs in the P2P network, consuming all the bandwidth they can. The obvious way to deal with this flood is to charge for the bandwidth used, or at the very least to put the P2P traffic at the end of the transmission queue.
Such a market mechanism would, of course, create a system in which paid-for content got priortiy over pirated. This would seriously subvert the copyleft's view that content must be socialiized -- distributed for free with creators funded by the government.
So Castle's thesis is that much of the steam behind net neutrality is provided by the copyleft's desire to prevent any effective countermeasures to illicit P2P. His conclusion:
So if you are an artist or someone who benefits from the creative community, understand that when the Lessig cabal try to get you to support “net neutrality” there’s nothing neutral about it all, and it is all of a piece in their campaign to crush our rights and our business. As the Nutty Professor put it succinctly in one of his anti-copyright diatribes: “We’re bigger than them [so if you contribute to EFF we will win].” Meaning they’re bigger than us, so they should get to have their way. He said it, I didn’t.
posted by James DeLong @ 1:52 PM | Telecom
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