NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: [OT?] NN definition(s?)
On Sun, 2007-11-11 at 10:01 -0700, Brett Glass wrote: > Here's a very key point, and one I don't think anyone has brought > up yet in this forum: There's an economic side to this issue as > well. Were BitTorrent traffic all legitimate, it would be limited > by simple economics. No one could afford to download every song or > movie in the world if he or she were paying for the content and it > were being distributed legally! So, if everyone acted within the > law, the load would be, at least to some extent, self-limiting. > > In the real world, however, we have uncontrolled and rampant piracy > of intellectual property, and many people who hoard the pirated > content. So, the load is sure to become intolerable. The issues of > copyright infringement and excessive use of bandwidth are thus > inextricably intertwined. > Actually, this is kind of backwards. It's economically inefficient copyright laws that are keeping a throttle on the demand for broadband. If we lived under Pareto-efficient copyright laws, it would be 50-80% of the population trying to use the net to download huge amounts of music and film, not 20%. But aside from that, you're forgetting that there are unlimited licensed music subscription services available for $5-10 / month. It's the DRM, and not the price, that have prevented those services from taking off. Also note that it costs a few dollars to rent a DVD. Film studios are moving to prices for movie downloads that are in the same range. Users can chew through a lot of non-copyright-infringing bandwidth at those prices. And if the bandwidth was available, we could be talking about HD video downloads at 10GB/movie or more. -- Peter Eckersley pde@eff.org Staff Technologist Tel +1 415 436 9333 x131 Electronic Frontier Foundation Fax +1 415 436 9993