Re: [Preview + Feedback + Suggestion] Digit February 2007 - Power 2 The People
Dear Friends,
I am new to the forum of digit, but I am attached with digit since it was Chip. I thought of writing articles for digit but you can say that I was a shy guy who was not having anything specific to write or may be that was not the right time to interact with you people. I think that’s enough about me as well as my collaboration with digit. Now come to the point why I thought now to interact with all of you.
This is regarding the cover feature (Power 2 The People) of February 2007 issue of digit written by Robert Smith. He has also given a caption to the story “Can piracy via P2P be stopped?
My answer to his question is “Yes! Piracy can be stopped!”
The first question he raised in his article about the legality. I don’t want to give all the details of the article. So readers are requested to go through the article themselves (As it is also illegal to copy the contents of an article for your purpose). Can it be possible to ban all P2P? also is it not like restricting the rights of the companies just because some users are doing something for which the software is not meant? Just to give an example- In India there is a handsome number of personalities who use cough syrups just for nasha and not as a medicine. What does it implies? Will it be a great idea to ban the cough syrups? The answer is ‘No’ and why not? The answer is given in the advantages part of the article.
There is one solution given by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which seems most humorous to me. It says that instead of suing a few Americans for downloading music, perhaps we should just charge every individual with a broadband connection a small monthly fee and allow them to download all the music they want from P2P, without any legal issues. Now, what if a person don’t want to download anything from P2P, why he will pay for that extra (even if it is a small amount). Also, it is not a solution to stop piracy but it is like a clear win of pirates.
Before the solution:
I just want to give a brief of how P2P works. A person gives the name of file (whatever the format is) to the downloader software. The downloader software searches for all the occurrence of that file and displays the files. The user selects a file and starts downloading.
Now here lies the idea:
Let me describe my idea in a very simple way. We all know that there exists a main file in every case. In case of softwares its .exe or .com without which a user can not run the software or you can say the initial coding is given in that file. Now, my idea is that one tag is inserted into it, which will only reflect that this software is not a sharable software. Now, here comes the trick. The P2P downloader creating persons can be forced to make their downloaders read that tag and if that tag is found, it will not be displayed in the list of available downloads. Now if the file will not be displayed in the downloader, it will not be downloaded.
Let us consider the fact that suing thousands of users of a downloader is difficult but making a downloader responsible for not able to read tag is much easier and hence suing one person who is responsible for making that downloader is good.
I am waiting for the response from the persons here on this forum as well as digit team.
Pushpinder Arora