At 07:43 AM 10/24/03 -0700, Steve Schear wrote:
At 06:28 AM 10/24/2003 -0400, Roy M. Silvernail wrote:
The problem with the central premise, of course, is that without some Big (Brother) Central Server, there's just no way to track simultaneous usage, so there's no way to assure that the number of users <= the number of owners.
Wrong.
Why not have each individual's PC which offered to lend do the accounting. This means their PC must be on-line whenever someone who didn't pay wants to listen, limiting the number of copies available, but it could be fully decentralized.
Yes but it needn't be online constantly. What *is* a library? 1. A library is legal. A library needn't be licensed by any state entity. 2. Thus, I can declare my computer a library. The only requirement is that I own a license to what I lend, and that only 1 user exercise that license at a time. That is what a library is. 3. Among library-users, we contractually require that "borrowed" materials be not used after the "return" date. Since bits are bits, "borrowing" is "copying" and "returning" is simply not exercising the bits. When something is being used no one else can use the same. We use our library-patron-contract to implement what meatspace does with objects --usable at one place at one time. 4. We could implement this by merely keeping a flag for each file in our collection denoting that the file is borrowed. We would be obligated not to relend it until after the return date; the library patron would be similarly obligated not to use it afterwards (without checking it out again). 5. We do *not* need to be constantly online for this, any more than a library needs to be open 24 hours a day. We *do* need a shared timebase and good IDs for objects. A legal assault on this mechanism is an assault on bricks and mortar libraries, ie the right to lend a book to an associate. Even if that associate xeroxes the book without our knowing it. Perhaps these features could be added to KaZaa. (Simply: when a file is uploaded from your disk, you move it from shared to not shared directory for a day. You also have some lameass clickthrough library-patron contract.) Gentlemen, start your lawyers. --- Talk softly and carry a big lawyer. ---Hunter S Roosevelt