[p2p-research] Where is P2P in the Pirate Bay, was: Pirate Bay Conviction Analysis from NETTIME list...

[Andy Robinson]

Point taken, BUT...

The p2p nature of the technology infrastructure is crucial to the resilience
to repression, and also, isn't the development of technologies in this area
usually p2p among designers as well?

I wonder how passive the use is; I actually doubt that:
"99.99% of the people... never remix or make any derivative work of what
they put into, or get from those networks."
is true, from the scale of movie-videos (such as "AMVs") put to music on
YouTube and similar sites; and people using commercial music in their home
videos etc - I think this is actually more common than reposting commercial
content unedited.  I'm inclined to think having things available in copiable
format tempts people to use them in creative ways, especially when the tools
to use them are also readily available.

Something following from the Filipino argument - I thought it was very
interesting to see this issue put in a North-South perspective.  Now I think
about it, that Argentine case and the recent Brazilian law aside, all the
really nasty copyright stuff seems to happen in the North.  Countries in
Asia which I'd expect to be quite repressive (China, Malaysia, Singapore,
Hong Kong) seem to be surprisingly inactive on copyright matters, at least
if measured by the amount of dodgy stuff that's exported from or hosted
there.  I was recently told by an Indian student that India doesn't have
intellectual property laws except for the film industry.  Not sure if it's
true, but they do produce and distribute generic versions of drugs which are
patented in the North.  There was a case back in January of an Indian ship
exporting drugs to Brazil being seized in Holland, even though the generics
on board were permitted in both India and Brazil.  There's also been a
takeoff of OS/FS systems in some Southern countries (Brazil, Venezuela,
South Africa have all officially embraced Linux variants, Nigeria is
strongly hooked up with the One Laptop Per Child project).

Makes me wonder if there could be a redistribution of global power on this
basis - parts of the South become successful based on not impeding flows of
symbols, signs and data, while the North cuts off its own development
through copyright rent-extraction.

bw
Andy
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20090422/87e1804d/attachment.html>