LG Digital has announced that a full A3 sized e-paper that will be introduced in April. The novelty in LG’s latest marvel, is that it makes the physical distribution and the every day hustle of printing millions of newspapers obsolete. The Gutenberg era of mechanical reproduction is changing into digital reproduction. The smell of ink and the touch of fresh paper soon will be nostalgia. Newspaper corporations are sluggish and conservative in their approach to new media. The distribution costs rise dramatically and the product is a static, disposable, environmentally unfriendly medium. What is the USP of a news paper? Is it the content? The Smell? Selling Paper? Selling emotion? A combination of these elements? In this post, I will briefly elaborate on the contemporary distribution. And I will propose a distribution model that is based on digital reproductivity and its positive effect on the contemporary environment, distribution and costs.
(Engels)
“When Napster told the district court that it had developed a technology to block the transfer of 99.4 percent of identified infringing material, the district court told counsel for Napster 99.4 percent was not good enough. Napster had to push the infringements ‘down to zero’. If 99.4 percent is not good enough, then this is a war on file-sharing technologies, not a war on copyright infringement.” (Lessig, p.74)
What is the percentage of identified infringing material on the Pirate bay? The discourse whether This portal is illegal or not shouldn’t be that complex. Free Culture, to me, is very important. We have should take the distribution of creativity very seriously! Creativity is the catalyst for inspiration, which in its place, is responsible for the social, political, and commercial development of our cultural identity. P2P – as an infrastructure – is a substantial contribution to the development of our cultural identity. The Pirate Bay (what’s in the name) facilitates this contribution as well! but, this has its influence on the revenue of honest creators. If we accept and normalize an amount of distributed infringing material, then, on the basis of the ratio between illegal and legal distribution, we could determine whether a facilitator operates illegal.
A few questions pop up… What really is illegal, when we accept a system that is old and based upon ‘property’ in a virtual world of endless re-productivity? Does a maximum compressed movie-file, which doesn’t comes near the original quality, is eligible for copyright infringement? Or, why should we prohibit or normalize illegal downloading when we technologically could enforce zero tolerance? Why isn’t the government being held responsible when a car driver is speeding and distrusting cocaine? P2P is held responsible in the same way! In my opinion, if the Pirate bay is excessively violating the norm (not 99.4%) then they should be punished! But what is the norm? Maybe we should be focusing on that!
(Engels)
I just read an article on Tweakers that Ipoque, a German company that sells ‘deep packet inspection-hardware’, has published a study on the distribution of protocol classes. This chart is a representation of their findings.
distribution of protocol classes (source: Tweakers.net)
With the ‘deep packet inspection-hardware’ internet Providers can analyze internet traffic. This hardware also enables providers to regulate the traffic by providing the ability to filtering and prioritize certain protocols. As a result, P2P-traffic is declining. Be that as it may, more interesting to me is the fact that Tweakers mentions the decline of P2P over the ‘normal’ web traffic. I think we could better speak of P2P-traffic as being the norm because of its hegemony. Anyway, the regional coverage of the study has been extended to include eight regions of the world, namely: Australia, Eastern Europe, Germany, the Middle East and Southern Europe, Northern and Southern Africa, South America and Southern Europe. The data that has been analyzed is of one provider/region. The amount of users per region differs between 50.000 and 250.000.
Here are some of the key findings of the study summed up. (published here):
- P2P generates most traffic in all regions
- The proportion of P2P traffic has decreased BitTorrent is still number one of all protocols, HTTP second.
- The proportion of eDonkey is much lower than last year.
- File hosting has considerably grown in popularity.
- Streaming is taking over P2P users for video content
- Usenet, a file sharing alternative for P2P, appears in the statistics for the first time
Would the decline of (war on) P2P-traffic be a result of the ‘creative property’-right lobbyists?
Would this decline worsen the ability to get a hold on ‘creative property’ from of which we get inspired to create our own?
Would this be the end of ‘free culture’?