European Union Changes and how they might effect filesharers

No I'm not going to go into the exact details of the changes, just provide a simple analogy of the current situation and how these changes effect it.

First a short rant about taking this type of thing seriously.

Often serious problems downplayed and quickly dismissed by many people in the p2p community. Threats which deserve attention and action, go on mostly ignored by the majority.

People that should know better tend to only help to encourage others to remain vulnerable.

Just because there are millions of vulnerable filesharers out there on fasttrack and other unsafe polluted networks, does not mean that it is ok and safe to continue using them.

Analogy

Think of the p2p networks like being in a neighborhood, just about everyone on your block is in a straw hut and the evil empires, hackers and others are like gangsters. They keep circling your block doing drive by's. Many people who are not even using applications like peerguardian, are basically just standing up in front of a window. The few that do use such applications are hiding behind a wall. Now consider the very few that use something like i2phex, they are hiding out in a bomb shelter.

Now granted bittorrent is not exactly the same. Instead of there being one block there are many, so it just takes the gangsters more time to cover them, however that only buys a little time, not nearly enough and there are a few blocks which are more enticing to the gangsters than others.

Also consider that now the European Union and others are considering changing things. Instead of the drive by's, the gangsters are just parked outside everyone's house and are armed with chainguns.

So how safe do you feel in your straw hut?

What about pay services?

Though also there are pay networks like itunes, napster and more on the way, they are like gated communities. You have to follow very restrictive community rules, only share and download the content they allow. Of course that being only drm music.

However there are also many scam sites which mislead people and charge for access to free clients and networks.

So straw hut or bomb shelter which is right for you?

Well if you are just sharing content like linux iso's and freeware, yes you could use a straw hut, though be careful you might get hit by a stray bullet.

If you don't know with absolute certainty what is and is not ok to share, then better safe than sorry, hiding out in a bomb shelter is your best option for online filesharing.

Stray bullets?

The gangsters are wildly spraying bullets every which way, anyone can be hit, not just the intended targets. Even people that do not engage in filesharing, get hit, notified and sued. There are no standards, nothing restricting the bullets to just hit who they are supposed to. Nobody offical that looks over the targets and approves them before hand.

Just random violence and terrorism from the gangsters. They hold all the cards and no matter which one is picked it is always the correct card, without any question.