In praise of leeches

[Beeza]

ffound an interesting article that defends freeloaders

this outta make some ppl hot under the collar LOL

http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/01/shirky_freeloading.html

-beeza

[Loomer]

umm... arnt we all freeloaders? i mean.. it's not like we pay for theas songs we are downloading in the 1st place. i'm not deffending the RIAA or eny crap like that. But hell. I'm a leech. or a freeloader. or what ever the hell you want to call me. and so is every one els.

[dogmeat]

It's an interesting article, but I see it as a play on words. You either do believe in the effect of leeches or you don't. Any user that does not contribute to the network is a leech. Imagine that the network is a ball tied to a string. Every user pulls this string in either of two directions in a distance proportional to how much they share; files, bandwidth or CPU process. Keep in mind that the most important of the three is files. Bandwidth is closely related to files and CPU process applies to Primary users in the case of WinMX. Users that don't share will pull that string in a negative direction, thus putting more strain on the sharing users to maintain the networks position.

The essence of a filesharing network is the availability of files to download. Non-sharing users contribute nothing to this availiability. In fact, they decrease it with each download they have running. You have to view it not as an infinate, but as a snapshot of a given moment.
If all users shared, it would be easier to get a file. You would even be more likely to complete rare files in a shorter amount of time. It's difficult to explain, but I'll try as best I can. Imagine a user is searching for a file and only one other user has it. The user with the file should be spending less time uploading common files because all users are sharing and multisource downloading will allow downloads to complete sooner. Or users will have more selection for what version of the file they are looking for. This would decrease the odds of a downloader selecting the exact common file a user is sharing. With less requests for common files, the rare files will take up a greater precentage of their upload queue. Also, with each user that is able to download this file, it becomes more common. I don't know if I explained that well enough for someone else to understand, but it makes sense to me.