North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Senator Diane Feinstein Wants to know about the Benefits of P2P

  • From: Iljitsch van Beijnum
  • Date: Mon Aug 30 15:52:00 2004 
On 30-aug-04, at 20:27, Henry Linneweh wrote:


So I would like some professional expert opinion to
give her on this issue since it will effect the
copyright inducement bill. Real benefits for
production and professional usage of this technology.
Peer to peer technology has the potential to allow individuals and organizations with modest means to reach a very large audience with substantial amounts of data. The example of software updates has already been discussed. Companies like Microsoft and Apple can afford to buy very large amounts of bandwidth so they can deliver these files to everyone who wants them individually. However, the same isn't true for free operating systems such as Linux and the BSD family. The technology is also very well suited for distributing free movies digitally, which would otherwise be prohibitively slow or expensive. As such, peer to peer has the potential to be a great asset to audiovisual free speech.

And that's just the obvious examples. Peer to peer technology allows for extremely robust distribution mechanisms, that are very hard to create in other ways. I'm sure in time, there will be more applications for it. For instance, peer to peer would be a great way to distribute large amounts of data to hospitals, fire stations and so on in case of wide-scale emergencies.