[492] in resnet
Re: Keeping traffic internal
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ermey, Ann)
Mon Dec 3 17:38:15 2001
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Message-ID: <F73B91BED37FD5119F970008C7CF50FC07EC46D9@skylark.mail.ukans.edu>
Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2001 15:50:24 -0600
Reply-To: Resnet Forum <RESNET-L@listserv.nd.edu>
From: "Ermey, Ann" <aermey@UKANS.EDU>
To: RESNET-L@listserv.nd.edu
Gnutella server, shaping, capping.......we are beginning a lot of these
actions as well. Only as a short term solution (hopefully) and are looking
very seriously at usage based charging next fall! Anyone out there doing
this? Any thoughts?
Ann Ermey
University of Kansas
NTS ~ ResNet
1802 Engel Road
Lawrence, KS 66045
785-864-9310
aermey@ku.edu
-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Holeton [mailto:holeton@STANFORD.EDU]
Sent: Monday, December 03, 2001 2:29 PM
To: RESNET-L@listserv.nd.edu
Subject: Re: Keeping traffic internal
Mike, Tyler, et al.,
First, Tyler, thanks for defending your comrades from across the bay!
I guess it's time we speak up for ourselves. Hopefully Ethan, our
network administrator, will be chiming in here too specifically about
the Gnutella server. Meanwhile I'd like to take a poke at the bigger
issues.
I do understand that there are purely technical problems with P2P
protocols wreaking havoc with limited bandwidth, and that networking
folks are in many cases simply doing their best to make do with
limited resources that must be shared by all. But that's certainly
not the whole story, and I agree with most of Tyler's points and
counterarguments vs. the various objections raised by Mike. And of
course, our little Gnutella experiment is intended to help, not hurt,
the bandwidth crunch.
Above all, I too am encouraged to see some more substantive
discussion about P2P. The vast majority of ResNet-L postings on P2P
have been focused on the strictly technical perspective: How do we
stop these things or at least slow them down? -- with scant attention
paid to the serious and controversial social and policy issues.
There have been the occasional discussions about educational efforts,
though even these usually proceed from the value-laden assumption of
"How do we get students to stop doing bad things?" Notice how even
some of the current thread quickly devolved back into a debate about
the technical merits of Packeteer!
I would rather see a debate about the extent to which traffic shaping
is really content control. And if it's de facto content control, who
should be making these decisions -- network technicians, or the
entire community including faculty and students? (We are free to ask
such questions here because ResComp at Stanford is not part of the
IT/Networking group. And we are asking them -- because yes, our
student network is both capped and shaped. And here let me quickly
clarify that the Gnutella experiment is ours, not Networking's or
"Stanford's" in any official sense.)
re: "academic" vs. "entertainment" content
Agree heavily with Tyler. Again, no matter what your view on this,
network technicians/administrators are not the people who should be
drawing and defining such distinctions, which are very dubious to
begin with. Faculty and students should be part of any such
decision. Many or most are not even aware that these kinds of
decisions are being made without their participation -- there's a
place to focus some educational efforts! (1) Popular culture and
entertainment media are increasingly themselves the subject of
academic study across a number of disciplines, as they should be; (2)
why shouldn't students living on campus, for whom we are the only ISP
option, be allowed to do purely "entertainment" activities anyway?
re: P2P as drugs
I too like this analogy, though for entirely different reasons than
Mike (the logic was: drugs are bad, P2P is bad, both should be
controlled). The analogy isn't perfect, but like marijuana use on
college campuses in the '70s, P2P is so popular that banning it can't
be enforced; only the big-time, most visible abusers (i.e. the big
dealers) get busted (or distributing is punished while consuming is
tolerated); people widely flout a law seen to be unreasonable and
stupid; flouting the law includes an ethic of power-to-the-people
democracy and resisting an abusive system; etc. One obvious
difference is that marijuana was actually illegal, while P2P is not.
re: assumption that using copyrighted material is bad, illegal, end of
story...
Actually the use of copyrighted material is quite legal under certain
circumstances, and indeed the main purpose of the copyright laws
throughout most of their existence has been to insure that the public
has the right to use and share information, rather than to protect
the monopoly rights of owners of "intellectual property." That is
why copyrights are time-limited licenses, that is why they expire
after a set period. That balance has been shifting in recent laws
and court decisions, a shift that is both complex and controversial.
The balance is shifting from the public interest and even from the
interests of individual artists or knowledge producers towards the
large media companies who own the most profitable chunks of
"intellectual property." But even today copyright law is still about
a *balance* between public and private interests.
The logic that because a technology *can* be used for illegal
purposes means it should be banned was specifically overruled in the
case of VHS home recording. In that case the public's right to use
technology for legal purposes outweighed the illegal potential. And
ended up being a boon to the very industry who fought tooth and nail
against it. Although that same reasoning did not carry the day
specifically in the Napster case, the legal battle isn't over.
Rich
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