Ashwin Navin, president of BitTorrent (the company, not the protocol), writes a column today for News.com decrying the decision by Ohio University to block all peer-to-peer traffic. He makes good points about the importance of p2p as a communications technology, but pays little attention to the elephant in the room: the no. 1 use for p2p networks is illegal downloading. I'm fascinated by the problem this presents. It's far better to punish bad behavior than ban technology, particularly when the latter has potentially great applications. But what do you do when the public is interested only in the illegal ones? (And to answer a question Navin asks in his essay, this usage pattern is what makes p2p technologies different from e-mail, instant messaging, FTP and other tools that can be used for piracy, but are mainly used for legitimate purposes.)
More on this in a second, but first: Bit Player sticks another toe into the 21st Century by activating its Technorati Profile.
One approach taken by other colleges is to permit p2p use, but limit how much bandwidth it can consume. Another idea is to monitor the traffic to try to stop the unauthorized copying of movies, albums, TV shows and the like. This kind of monitoring has drawn flak, too, as well as questions about its effectiveness. It's clear to me that banning p2p on campus isn't the right way to go, no matter how much pressure the RIAA and its friends in Congress apply. But colleges can't ignore the piracy elephant, either.
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