2006 14
Is Gmail the new P2P?
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with No Comments
I was just having lunch with my son Tom, who is 12, and I told him that I was going to send him an e mail and he replied that his gmail account was full. Full? I told him that he´s probably one of the only people who have so much e mail that gmail gets full and he replied that he and his friends all had the same problem. Why? Because they use gmail as the new P2P. They send each other songs and compressed movie files over gmail.
In any case, I hope I am more successful about the condom talk next year as I was with this year with my explanation on music and movie commercial licensing policies. If my school gets a book and we all read it, he said, why shouldn´t one of us buy a CD and we all enjoy it?
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John on October 15, 2006 ·
That logic works as long as he hands the physical CD to his friend to listen to. While his friend has it, he does not. When he sends a copy of the CD to a friend that would be the same as the school making photocopies of the entire book to hand out.
Of course, it is also the reason that, although it is wrong, it is not theft. Theft implies that the owner no longer has the item, or use of the item, which is not the case here. The owner, in this case a music company, simply lost a license sale (one they were probably never going to get in the first place). They still own the songs, and can still sell them to other people, so they have not been stolen. That nuance is something that the music companies are trying to hide.
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Logic on October 14, 2006 ·
A perfect example of a child’s logic. But he does have a point. It seems in todays world what is acceptable for you to share and not share is a little fragmented.
Regards