When there’s wood in the shed, there’s a bird in the chimney. And a stone in my bed.
This article examines peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing and the copyright enforcement problem it has created through the lens of scalability. Writing about the growth and governance of the Internet, David Post observed that “scaling problems - the problems that arise solely as a consequence of increasing size or increasing numbers - can be profound, and profoundly difficult to solve.” Both the Internet’s designers and P2P network designers solved difficult problems of scale in their efforts to revolutionize the distribution of information goods. In doing so, however, they created a problem of scale in the form of “massive infringement.” How to approach solving that problem of scale is the subject of this article.
