Monday, September 23, 2002

Poisoning the Commons Business 2.0 has an article on how two bright UWashington Seniors came up with a strategy to thwart illegal file-sharing on P2P networks. Upon a semi-diligent inspection of their thesis - I find it seriously questionable. The economic costs of flooding a network with spoofed files are considerable. For e.g., Given the time of initial release, do you know how many file copies of Beatles' 'Hey Jude' are out there ? What would it cost to drown out those files ? Consider that each file is a P2P node by itself. A premise of the thesis that downloaders would keep the spoofed (false) files around and thereby, creating a viral effect, is too presumptuous. The thesis would do well with some 'Systems Thinking' - perhaps, an economic model using 'Stella' with the costs factored in. Daniel Fife has a theory on how "killing the goose" in the Commons can be made profitable. A strategy (for Hollywood) to consider is to flood the networks with spoofed files a little PRIOR to the release of the CD or DVD - in effect, creating a "vaccination". This would be cheaper than lobbying Congress. (A moral hazard in itself). For an additional perspective - read John Dvorak's column in the PC Magazine (Oct 15 '02) issue. His article entitled 'One Buck Forty or Die' states how the Music Industry's monopoly has got to go. 8:10:40 AM