Quote:
Originally Posted by DawnFalcon
Um. That's quite the assumption, and I can think of a dozen ways round that without trying too hard. Yes, some of them involve a custom client...but we're talking about book-length material, it's NOT a lot of data.
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Even IF you had a technical way around it, do you have a cultural one? P2P is about private individuals sharing files between one another. How many people do you think will be willing to give away their bandwidth to non-free content? With free (or freely pirated) material, people seed out of a sense of community and because they want the system to work. But a for-profit business selling DRMed content?
Screw them. Let them pay for their own bandwidth. People will download and drop out immediately.
Also, the smaller a torrent (or some other vehicle of P2P content) the more susceptible it is to dying. If you want a torrent to last, you have to bundle dozens or hundreds of things together so that there are more likely to be people both uploading and downloading at any given moment. Anything offered only as individual files will, sooner rather than later, be collected together by someone and made available as a much more convenient (and longevous) batch. Which, if not large enough, will be gathered together with other torrents by the end user and, when one has enough files, burned to CDs or DVDs, with the source (and any comments thereon) forgotten about and irrelevant. And with most of the files never even given more than a quick glance, if that.
You think slushpiles are a black hole? That is nothing compared to the archives of a media hoarder (I don't know how much media I have hoarded away on DVDs, but it is in the mid-single digit terabytes.)