Ok now as I understand in some places ISPs provide cost-per-amount of data sent. That sucks because you can't have anything serious on such a connection, even a webserver could doom you forever, not to mention an uncontroled P2P connection.

But still let's face it, there are dosens of archives around and they are rather unsearchable (I remember a ModSearch, but it didn't work anymore in a matter of weeks) and there are duplicates of everything everywhere.

In eMule it is possible to provide a source along with a file link, which basically means that if you have a dedicated server that's powerfull enough, you can offer ed2k links instead of HTTP ones and the tracks will be downloaded at least on the server's bandwidth and will start imediately when the server is capable of supplying them (which may as well be immediately).

And being as such, the server would only be providing the files it hosts, which generally means that if somebody does not transfer illegal content onto it, it won't be there. So no legal problems at all by merely using P2P alone.

The idea of course is to have a comprehensive catalog of all sources where to find a track and a way to indentify individual tracks globaly. If anyone made that an applet all servers could run that would simply connect all the tracking world like that, I'd be quite happy, but it's plain stupid to be doing that, when it is already made and well tested, debugged and wide-spread in the world of P2P.

All we need is to allow the artists to add an ED2K link allong with a HTTP one, when publishing a track. Now that wouldn't be so hard now would it? :wink:





Well to sum up what I wrote on the united-trackers forum, if you have a dedicated server to host the files, P2P standards won't hurt it's ability to distribute files.

P2P in essence merely ensures that in the case that the server that usualy distributes it fails, your files may still have a chance to be out there somewhere, maybe only from 3 pm to 5 pm in your timezone, but they will still be out there. By providing an ED2K hash-based link allong with a HTTP one, will allow for the link to always refer to your file, no matter where it happens to be hosted. 

The eMule client then automatically verifies the sources you may have provided in the link, attempts to find others, etc all to get your file and perfectly automatic and once it does get the file, it will not be draining anyone's bandwidth in particular, but conveniently utilize the combined bandwidth of all sites that happen to host it.

I think it is worth considering that P2P may well be a good solution precisely for the comunity that the scene tends to be. It would in effect make it easier for some to organize some kind of hosting for their files and make all the 100000000 private collections actually aid the songs' availability, making all the problems associated with moving from one host to another a thing of the past and other advantages.

And all it takes is to provide a field for entering the ED2K link allong with the HTTP one. We could do that now, huh?