P2P File Transfer

The petition is entitled Ban Peer to Peer Communication Software and the explanatory notes say

"Considering the immense uprall of peer to peer communication technology, and the relative knowledge and avalablity of it, I propose that it is banned completely, rather than have inumerous inadequate attempts to police these applicactions.

Taking in to account the immense problems that the music industry is coming under, it seems farcical to allow these scroungers to destroy the industry."

I'm going to resist the temptation to point out exactly how dubious the petitioner's claims of "immense problems" for the music industry are, and how little evidence there is that any form of pirating is "destroy[ing] the industry".

But let's ignore that. It's contentious and complicated and I can't be bothered.

Let's think about the practicality. People download software from all over the place. The internet has no international boundaries. Well, OK, there's weird stuff possible at a high level, c.f. the Chinese censoring stuff, - but I don't think that this could be applied merely to software downloads. You can ban people from downloading the software, but that certainly isn't going to stop anyone, and you're not going to be able to police it.

Furthermore, even if you could invent some deeply clever way to enforce the ban, people would merely use other methods to transfer music and other files between them.

It does also seem a little unfair on those amateur musicians (and probably not-signed-to-big-companies pros) who want to promote themselves by any means possible and for whom P2P is a good way of getting their music out there.