[Vorbis] Extension proposal - partly serious

[noprivacy at earthlink.net]

<20040620213353.GG9120 at xiph.org>
Message-ID: <008a01c4572e$2883b990$67389c3f at computername>

From: "Arc Riley" <arc at xiph.org>

> On Sun, Jun 20, 2004 at 12:34:40PM -0700, Dan Hollis wrote:
> >
> > Obviously legal p2p isnt part of your plan either.
>
> Illegal P2P uses decentralized protocols almost exclusivly.
> Decentralized networks are the ones which implement their own internal

> Legal P2P, on the other hand, uses some form of server-based indexing
> hyperlinking so that people looking for content can find it without

Say what?

De-centralized networks are done for performance and reliability reasons.

It has nothing to do with legality of either the networks themselves or the
content. (And contrary to what you are implying, a lot of content does exist
and gets shared that is not illegal.  There is enough stuff that it would
overwhelm a centralized network.  And all of the networks themselves are
legal.  Regardless of their structure.)

Even in the early days of napster, long before anybody began complaining
about it or even before it became as popular as it later did, there were a
lot of performance problems, hardware problems would bring down major
portions of the system, and so on.  The same has been true of every other
centralized network, regardless of whether they do all kinds of files, or
concentrate on pictures, or on porn, or on text files, or music or whatever.

Even with BitTorrent today, for legal stuff (such as Linux distros), heavy
traffic will bring the master torrent node to a near halt.  Even the
BitTorrent originator readily admits that it has major failings because it
is centralized and that each torrent can only point to a single server.

Even I've used BitTorrent to download a copy of Linux, and it would often
take over an hour before the client could even connect with the server.  And
sometimes the server would be down (I guess) because it'd be days before I
could even begin to download.

De-centralization is the same reason the internet works as reliably as it
does.  Because if one part goes down, the rest stays up.