[asterisk-users] OT: What do you guys think of this?

[SIP]

Doug wrote:
> At 18:56 12/1/2008, Tilghman Lesher wrote:
>  >On Monday 01 December 2008 06:21:33 pm Doug wrote:
>  >> We tell our customers that they are not allowed to
>  >> download copyrighted material.
>  >
>  >So your customers are only allowed to download public domain
>  >material?  That kind of restricts the amount of information
>  >available on the Internet.  Nitpick:  just about everything, including
>  >this email, is copyrighted by somebody.  Forbidding the download
>  >of copyrighted works is not only a draconian policy, but may actually
>  >violate several copyright laws (you're interfering with a copyright
>  >owner's right to distribute his/her/their works, and courts are
>  >generally not very sympathetic with your position).
>
> Oops!  Didn't mean to start a fire here.
>
> I meant to say "illegal copyrighted material".  Also, if they
> are using up hundreds of Internet connections, we can see
> that.  It essentially causes a Denial of Service situation
> for other users on that leg of our wireless network.  The system
> supposedly has rate limiting, but seems to get overloaded when
> someone goes completely nuts with BitTorrent.  We are working
> on ways to limit the number of simultaneous connections.
>
> When we get a copyright infringment notice from our upstream
> provider, we are compelled to reprimand the user.  I don't
> think we have sent a customer to the "shower" even if they
> had several notices.
>
> "Net Neutrality" is great in principle.  But ISP's need to
> somehow control those few percentage of users who suck down
> a huge majority of the bandwidth.  It's dollars and cents.
>
> Es tut mir leid für das Durcheinander meine Brüder!
>
>
>   
This is the classic logical fallacy that people seem to perpetuate when
reporting news about P2P activity.

ISPs oversubscribe. It's a common practice, and reasonably valid. But
when you oversubscribe, you use a model based on 'projected' use of the
available circuits and bandwidth. If you have a user who pays for a
circuit that you've advertised as an X Mb line, and he uses X Mb ALL the
time, he's using what he's paying for. If you then proceed to tell him
that he can't do that, you're either wrong or you're not being up front
enough with your pricing and marketing materials. You can't then proceed
to blame the customer for use you did not anticipate.

Imagine a farmer who sells tomatoes. He's promised you a bushel, but he
gets a harvest of only so many. You walk up to the counter just after
he's sold all of his tomatoes to someone and he tells you "Sorry. There
are no more tomatoes because that customer before you just 'stole' them
all from you. He's abusing his privileges by buying up my whole crop." 

Now whose fault is it that you don't get the tomatoes you want? Is it
the customer's fault for buying all the tomatoes the farmer sold him? Or
is it the farmer's fault for selling them?

The same works with the ISP vs P2P argument. If the ISPs were up-front
about saying that they do not intend for you to actually USE the
bandwidth you think you're paying for, I would say they had a leg upon
which to stand. However, hiding this information from the customer and
then blaming the customer when he does what he believes is well within
his rights... it may play well in the media, but it's bad for the whole
system and is incredibly divisive.

N.