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

Thu Apr 23 16:57:23 CEST 2009

Royalities were historically granted by kings of England to protect the
output of thinkers when printers could copy and set and text.  It was a
techno-morality issue associated with the wide distribution of the printing
press.  The same issue is very much in force today.  No one will pay if they
can get the lower cost or no cost version for free.

Amazon seems to have solved this particular issue in a way with the Kindle.
The device stores the right of access and they maintain an accounting of the
transaction.  You must use their free network to load and download.  If you
are not "legal" as in being in the Cayman Islands where copyrights are not
recognized, they will not send your device any new material even though they
have access rights through the cell network as licensed surplus bandwidth
(they call it "whispernet".)

Any p2p system could do the same--as a currency.  Your rights of access
could be earned and the network could be virtually private.  But the same
issues exist that are debated in the open currency frameworks.  Who has the
right to issue currency?  The solutions will be similar. If you don't use a
facilitator who does the accounting, you will need a normative culture of
trust.

Imagine making the Amazon Kindle system p2p.  The questions are, how do you
get free whispernet?  Who can place what materials on the grid?  Who can
receive what materials where?

In a currency framework, the questions are as follows:  How do I access a
network of currency recognizers?  What can be bought with or sold for the
currencies?  Are there any restrictions on how currencies can be used or
converted?

Free whispernet amounts to using excess bandwidth for purchased Internet
access.  Free riding is a minimal issue.  The same holds for currency
networks where the cost of discovering who accepts a currency is easily
tracked in an online database.  Who can place what materials on the grid or
for sale for a given currency is always going to be dictated by the policy
aims of the issuers.

In Pirate Bay, the policy aim was maximum access--fewest restrictions
regardless of other rules of law in force.  That is a form of uncivil
behavior in that it violates laws--no doubt about it.  Sactions exist just
like they do for people who soil a public park.
By tracking every currency transaction, as with the Kindle, a currency could
avoid having itself used for, say, certain vices--maybe not buying
cigarettes.  Because the accounting associated with moving the items would
be clear.  People can cheat accounting systems, which takes you into the
realm of auditors, etc.

The whole advantage of p2p is that it obviates the expectation that
enforcement and regulation mechanisms will add cost by instituting trust
into interactions.  The great question of p2p is the balance of trust versus
the collective savings of low regulation and enforcement.  Organizations
like Pirates Bay should be loathed by p2p people because they detract from
cultures of trust and commitment--something like what Andy suggests.

Anonymity (with money or with torrents) tends to empower vice.  If you want
to stop it, beef up accounting.  If you want to avoid expensive accounting,
create normative values of trust and responsibility (e.g. no free-riding to
excess).  All systems must make these policy choices from public parks to
communes to public corporations.  The difference arises in the expectations
of participants.  Some people race to conclusions about human nature, etc.
which are patently absurd.  Others argue for education to encourage norms.
Virtually all human problems from global warming to murder can be viewed as
a balance of rights and responsibilities.

What makes p2p different from capitalism or socialism is the explicit
emphasis on normative values of trust and responsibility.  What makes it
threatening to institutions is that institutions used to be the keepers of
those normative values--and then the educators.  But technology has now
moved that to the crowd.  Design of good p2p systems entails embedding
capacities for members to share their normative expectations--like
reputations in Ebay.  It might have worked the same way by the writers
banding together and talking to the printers in England in the 16th and 17th
centuries.  But at that juncture, people were inclined to state action and
enforcement because the costs of regulation and accounting were particularly
high.  They are less now given the grid.  The question is, how much do you
want to spend on regulation?  P2P answers that with a minimal expectation
given a culture of trust.

Ryan Lanham

On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 2:23 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Dear Andy,
>
> I'm very, VERY, interested in the distinction your making here, which
> echoes somewhat my own thinking on
> http://p2pfoundation.net/Netarchical_Capitalism
>
> Could you perhaps, for once I take the liberty to insist <g>, a rewrite on
> the contrast between progressive and reactionary business models?
>
> This is of crucial importance in establishing alliances,
>
> If you write it up, thanks for also being explicit about your concepts for
> a more lay audience,
>
> I'm not sure myself what 'addition of axioms' and 'expansion of flows'
> actually means
>
> examples to illustrate the concept would be very welcome,
>
> Michel
>
> On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 1:43 AM, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> It would seem that p2p could never entirely be "sharing without caring"
>> because the system relies on people seeding without apparent gain - the
>> downloader can easily remove files once downloaded, and seeding presumably
>> slows connections and increases risks of detection.  This is why it often
>> gets termed "gift economy".  If large proportions of users "leeched" without
>> "seeding" then the network would not be viable; probably it would then be
>> commercialised as somebody assumed the "scarce" function of seeding in
>> return for pay.
>>
>> I suppose on a broader level it is "without caring" about the artists (or
>> production costs) specifically, and that this could in theory render the
>> system non-sustainable in terms of abundance over time.  Though this would
>> seem to depend on a lot of things, including whether users are actually
>> stopping paying for items as well (or receiving through free means which
>> generate revenue), whether users are "sampling before buying", whether the
>> items downloaded are commercially available, whether people are also paying
>> voluntarily by other means (attending live shows of musicians, giving
>> donations to artists), what motivates people to produce the items in
>> question (music or whetever), and whether new "content" is being created for
>> free due to use of the networks.
>>
>> I'm not sure whether to theorise PirateBay as simply part of the p2p scene
>> or as a kind of axiomatisation built on top of it to extract value.  The
>> site itself is not p2p, it's a centralised archive of links (albeit
>> distributed across servers), and it seems to be built on the business
>> principle of extracting value, both from advertising on the site and
>> aggressive marketing of the PirateBay logo (sales of merchandise) and
>> services (IPREDator).  They seem to me to represent a "progressive" business
>> model (addition of axioms and expansion of flows) as opposed to a
>> "reactionary" business model (subtraction of axioms, blocking of flows and
>> extraction of rents on scarcity), but I wouldn't suggest they'd escaped the
>> logic of capitalism and entered entirely into gift economy.  So although the
>> struggle is between two models of capitalism, one of these models is
>> relatively "on the side" of the emancipated flows whereas the other is
>> definitively against them - a bit the same way that social democracy is
>> "relatively" inclusive of flows of difference compared to neoliberalism; but
>> in the same way, their existence ultimately depends on capitalism - without
>> the reducibility of flows to equivalence and representation, their own
>> business model wouldn't work either.  I've also noticed that fairly
>> mainstream, "well-behaved" online corporations - YouTube, eBay - are facing
>> the same kinds of lawsuits and complaints from the copyright cartels, for
>> the same kind of reasons: the openness, speed and volume of Internet flows
>> undermines rent-extraction.
>>
>> bw
>> Andy
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University -
> http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html -
> http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>
> Volunteering at the P2P Foundation:
> http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net -
> http://p2pfoundation.ning.com
>
> Monitor updates at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens
>
> The work of the P2P Foundation is supported by SHIFTN,
> http://www.shiftn.com/
>
> _______________________________________________
> p2presearch mailing list
> p2presearch at listcultures.org
> http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20090423/38294c1e/attachment-0001.html>