John Linton
Exetel has, since early 2005, invested an increasing amount of time to get a better understanding of the future of P2P in terms of both the impact on bandwidth deployment and the various 'legal' and 'quasi-legal' implications involved in being a 'link in the chain' that delivers data to and from points outside Exetel's control.
While we have gained, in my opinion, a considerable amount of knowledge over the past 18 months in how to both control and speed up the delivery of P2P 'packets' we haven't found any 'expert' source of legal advice on what the actuality of transmitting bits of data requires of us; or any other commercial entity that participates in providing some part of 'the internet'.
What we have found is a huge amount of unhelpful and totally uninformed (not based on case or statute law or anything like it) speculation of what might be the case in different scenarios. I have just completed the latest in a series of totally unhelpful, and very frustrating, discussions with a highly recommended and very reputable "Australian expert in copyright law and technology". The net of that conversation is that neither he, nor anyone of his acquaintance either in Australia or in the UK or the USA has any advice to offer on what MIGHT be involved in facilitating/participating as part of a much wider network in the carriage of data bits which when assembled might be construed as infringing somone's copyright.
We have only invested the time and money in investigating the legal aspects of switching data packets because we are innately cautious people and need to satisfy ourselves about this sort of issue.
(There must be better ways of spending thousands of dollars).
I have long term friends at both Sony and Warner Bros who are both implementing (in some cases have implemented) the distribution of video via P2P (BitTorrent). The article I referenced yesterday quoted the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as planning to distribute their programs via P2P as well as the comments by a Microsoft spokesman saying that Microsoft was looking at also using P2P to distribute some of its 'titles'.
There are already many hundreds of software companies using P2P to distribute their software and an increasing number of video titles are also being distributed by P2P.
With the current estimates of P2P usage of worldwide internet bandwidth being 60% of peak time and 90% of off peak time (and growing year on year) the 'legalities' of any individual commercial entity in participating in providing the switching of data packets is already beyond any national legislation and there certainly is no international 'body' in existence recognised by any nation.
According to the table on page 29 of the 13th October 2007 NewScientist article, over 75% of the bandwidth around the world is used to carry P2P data (no reference is given to the source of the research that generated that table).
I think my current view of Exetel's responsibilities in switching data packets through the tiny/minute part of the world wide internet that we provide is that we have no responsibility to determine, packet by packet, whether they comprise 8 bits of a terrorist message to kill innocent people, snuff movies or other horrendous criminal activities or some entity's intellectual property.
If anyone who may read this blog entry has a recommendation on a competent legal expert on this topic - I'd be grateful for their contact details.