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Investigation of the problems associated with P2P File-Sharing |
 NDO’s Sam Hill feels much the same way, although suggests that perhaps the Music Industry needs to look at its own failings first: “I feel this is an issue for the music industry to address and not one for ISP's. The industry needs to look at where the music market has gone – for the last few years CD single/album sales have declined dramatically, this is in part no doubt due to music piracy online but other factors too - the cost of CD's for instance versus free online downloads. Piracy as an issue has been around for many, many years - its not something new to the Internet. It could easily be argued the home computer market - Amigas and Atari ST's were both killed by piracy of friends passing copies of software around; even back in the days of the Spectrum and C64 people still used to copy the tapes and give copies to their friends. This model, as it were, has just gone with the advent of the Internet international. It may be illegal but there is very little the ISP industry as a whole can do to prevent it; yes we could easily (and several ISP's do) block the ports of the networks - but all that happens is the ports change; or the protocol changes - its a never ending war - and a war that the ISP's could not easily win. Even if ISP's locked the internet down to just say 4 essential ports – HTTP (80), HTTPS (443), SMTP (25) and POP3 (110) the file sharing networks would find ways to utilise what is left available for their networks to work; take ICQ for instance this features technology to enable it to work using Port 80 if it cannot find any other ways to connect to the ICQ network.” Conclusion P2P File-Sharing isn’t going anywhere, it’s now so well establish that ISPs either have to accept it and adapt or spend the rest of their days fighting what many believe to be an un-winnable war. That’s not to say they won’t
try, Pipex notes a number of options open to those still willing to
fight the inevitable: “There are lots of options open to ISPs
including introducing "low user" packages which restrict use
to very particular services (eg Web, mail and news), imposing usage
limits on customers or possibly introducing some kind of proxy server/cache
for P2P traffic. The precise mechanism would depend on the best solution
for the ISP's particular network.” [Print Page | Next Page (5)]>>
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