P2P Research Team Predicts the End of Copyright
Dr. Ir. Johan Pouwelse, (photo) researcher on peer-to-peer technology at Delft University of Technology, has recently published in collaboration with a few colleagues an article which reveals some of the results and conclusions his research embraced. The article, 21-page long, makes a good read, NewTeeVee says, but the most striking thing stated in it is that the copyright issue (which is at the core of most legal battles in the music and film industry) will be abandoned not so far in the future.
Pouwelse thinks the existing copyright system could fall apart as early as next year unless significant reforms are put into place. He draws this conclusion from an analysis of not only movie file-sharing, but activity on social networks like Facebook and streaming video sites like YouTube. All of these platforms are prime examples of user-based collaboration, or peer production, as Pouwelse likes to call it. These forms of peer production are not only getting more and more popular, but also increasingly sophisticated, to a point where they pose a significant challenge to our established system of content production and monetization.
The more attentively you read the article the less doubtful you tend to become with respect to the theory Pouwelse and his fellow colleagues present here.
The p2p researcher has been analyzing with his team the sharing content phenomenon along with that of social networking for a few years and after linking the two more clearly to a social aspect and tendency they have finally managed to draw a larger picture of the whole file sharing issue (whether through p2p networks or social websites like YouTube) and make shocking predictions about the fate of the most controversial aspect file sharing touches – copyright.
“Collaborative web sites and sharing platforms like YouTube are getting more popular and more social, leading to more shared content and better mechanisms to filter though this content. P2P networks, on the other hand, are getting more robust and increasingly capable of adopting some of these social networking and filtering mechanisms,“ NewTeeVee sums up.
The article also explains the role security will have in this dramatic turn of events: “By 2010 darknets should be able to offer the same performance as traditional P2P software by exploiting social networking,” (i.e. networks that make possible file sharing protecting the identity of its participants to other parties).
Well, the article surely gives us something to ponder upon and considering that the ability to be “connected “ to as many people as you possibly can has become one of the current trends (with sharing content as the main way to do it) Pouwelse and his colleagues might actually point towards an inevitable evolution of the p2p phenomenon.
