Next-Gen filesharing discussion

Recently, the anime distributor in my country's been cracking down rather hard on anime downloaders and so on. Though this isn't really a problem for me, the fact that 2/3 of the ISPs in my country gave out customer information with hardly any pressure give credence to the fact that they might probably do so if some other company decided to do the same thing.

However, to me, the problem with such next-gen file sharing systems is that, as you mentioned, they affect the whole nature of file sharing as a whole. Granted, it gives you more protection, but the fact that you're not able to download a greater variety of files as well as greatly reduced speeds for the files that you can download, tends to turn me off. After all, the point of these file sharing programs is the opportunity to find and acquire files that one normally cannot (without paying a lot of money that is). So, for me, I suppose I'd only switch when there's better and more reliable software that's readily available. I mean, if you look at P2P history, there's better and newer programs and software that comes out all the time, which is greatly improved, such as the great changes from the time of Napster to current BitTorrent.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Hmm. I just realised that this seems to be in the wrong forum. Oh well. Anyway, on to the discussion. (I'm too lazy to do all the quoting you did, so I'd just answer chronologically)

1. The whole thing about the lawyer offices must really suck. But are they effective? I mean, do letters = fine? Is there any way of appeal or whatever? In my country, recently, users have been told not to pay by their lawyers as the company in question, Odex, did have rather shaky copyright grounds to base their "fine" upon. It was no small amount either. The average cost each letter they sent out demanded was 3000-5000 SGD, which is about 1.5k euros to 2.5k euros.

2. As you mentioned, these new networks are not used by a wide majority of people, and most people wouldn't switch until others do so. I suppose in a way, it's kind of like a vicious cycle. You can't have more people to attract others, if no one's willing to take the first step I suppose. Maybe it's people like you that will do so.

3. Yes. I did mention that there's a lot of protection. But at what cost? If I recall correctly, TOR works on the basis of routing traffic from one computer to another, from the origin to your computer. Like you mentioned, it's thus limited by the speed of the computers it routes towards, and as well as the amount of computers using the particular service. For me, I've never had a decent experience using the TOR browser, let alone any P2P via TOR, but maybe it's just me or the servers that I had to go through. Yet, once again, the problem here boils down to the number of users who adopt a particular service I guess. Also, one other possible problem I can think of is that TOR itself does not mask traffic flow, but merely redirects traffic flow. So, what would happen if your traffic flow passes through someone else's computer, and that person just happens to have strict laws against filesharing in his country? Would you unnecessarily implicate someone? Maybe I'm wrong as to how the TOR system works, but from what I know, that might very well happen

4. I guess it's true, what you say, that there's no real "perfect" filesharing protocol, so it depends largely on the user as to what he or she is searching for. But I think it's hard to find someone who is willing to wait a month just to download some old movie? Then again, I think it boils down to a lack of users once again for the protocol. After all, like you and I mentioned, the number of users would thus determine number of files, and speed of downloads.

There's nowhere I can't reach.