How Peer-to-Peer Applications can affect Society ?

After the success of Napster, p2p or online file sharing application has become the single most killer application (besides WWW) in the Internet. Not biased by the fact that the growth of the application provides ample research opportunities for the researchers, I have additional reasons to get excited about p2p. I am wondering how p2p applications will affect the world economy, how the growth of p2p applications will re-shape human beings or distribute resources in the society. So, this post is mainly about effects of p2p on society.

P2P applications such as Bittorrent, KaZaa, Gnutella, eDonkey are mainly used to download media files both audio (mp3 songs) and video (mostly movies). These media files are usually stripped off from the media records or are recorded and uploaded for other users to download for free. Therefore, media industry is a direct and major stakeholder in this process at the losing end. For example, legal entity in US, RIAA has been waging battle to illegalize such media content distribution. But as we know, everything desirable in this world is either banned, illegal, married or fattening; so I guess inspite of all rules and regulations, the usage of p2p will keep growing. What could be the consequences ?

Hollywood/Bollywood movies are available online no later than they are released in the theatres. As a result p2p users will not spend money in watching movies at the theatres. Considering that this fraction will be significant soon, the profit of the movie producers will keep decreasing and soon they will stop making quality movies or at least that will prevent them from making more movies. Consequently the money that actors/actresses make will get diminishingly less. I think celebrities are hyped and they earn undue money (compare it with the fact that I spend more than 14 hrs or more at work doing more important work for humanity and still get paid less than 1% of what they earn. In addition they get glamor, publicity, money, multiple sexual partners).

Due to the poor quality of the movies, people will start watching less movies and therefore, young generation will be less affected by social vices such as violation, rape, smoking, romance. Actors/actresses will no longer find this business lucrative and will insist their kids to opt for other professions such as engineering, medical etc. Gradually the income distribution in the society will be less skewed. To attract the viewers the producers will try hard to be creative and will produce good quality movies but they will not earn as much as they now.

Growth of p2p applications will however make some economic sectors prosperous. Would ipod have been successful had there been no abundance of mp3 files through p2p applications ? More people will get hired by software and media industry to pollute the p2p network with garbage movie files, to distribute legal copies of software/media files over the p2p network.

Some social problems will reduce but some will increase. Gamers will get more games/xbox for free and therefore more people will get addicted. There will be more cases of divorces, crime due to gaming addiction. There might be more cases of dropouts.

Someone said, talking is not free in the world and I realized that is true when I got my phone bill. Skype has become popular worldwide since it is a free VoIP phone if both the caller and callee use Skype. Skype is again a p2p application where hosts relay traffic for other users. If Skype continues to grow and assuming that soon most of the people will have computer with Internet connection, it will put Telecom industry under heavy competition. I feel the telecom service providers charge a lot; its monopoly for no good reason. As a result of Skype prevalence, many telecom industries will be out of business, many high-paying CEOs will get fired and there will be less skewed income distribution. I wish I could talk to my family everyday. Therefore, with Skype in place, we will be able to feel much closer to people, family, lovemates. As a result, those who are involved in distant romance will be able to sustain their relationship comfortably (specially when girls tend to find new lovemates in absence of physical presence of their counterparts).

Graduate students cannot afford to buy expensive books all the time or sometime the books are not available even in university library. Once I needed a book (I could not obtain it even from other libraries) and I asked a friend if I could get a soft copy of the book. After a few weeks, he downloaded it from a Turkish server. I was happy to read the relevant chapter and then deleted it. Thus, p2p is also acting as a vehicle to spread education and will thus make education/knowledge accessible to deprived ones.

More and more I think about p2p applications, it makes me more optimistic about future.