[sldev] P2P Web Textures now in demand to enable lossless image downloads to viewer

[sldev at catznip.com]

I thought of a few problem points right when I read the proposal, but no one
else seemed to raise them thus far so here goes:

* it doesn't take into account that not everyone has unmetered data
transfer. If it's enabled by default, those people are going to unknowingly
waste a rather limited resource that has the potential to either get them in
trouble with their ISP, or to receive a higher ISP bill due to increased
transfer.
There's no way to detect this, and you can't reasonably expect everyone to
know or even understand, so the default for any peer should be that it
*won't* participate in uploads.

* there's no reliable way to determine available upstream bandwidth, nor is
it really a constant depending on what other applications someone has
running while they're on SL; if the P2P saturates the upstream, their SL
experience is going to degrade immensely. No matter how small a number get
picked by default, the bandwidth isn't guaranteed to be available.

* there's no guarantee that downloading from peers is going to be any faster
than downloading through the sim (someone suggested that downloading should
go entirely through peers). Given that the average peer will be most likely
be a low-bandwidth (for upstream) connection, chances are it will be slower,
especially if the route from peer to peer is congested or suddenly
unavailable and it has to time-out

* are there any legal issues? What happens if a texture is being infringed
upon and someone overzealous decides to subpoena everyone who is
distributing the texture, or worse, if the textures are highly illegal
pictures. The liability doesn't just have to be remote or theoretical, it
has to be non-existent since no one but LL can claim a common carrier status

* clueless on this one, but what happens to the low, medium and full detail
texture "streaming" we currently have? Torrents download pieces randomly as
far as I know.

I don't mean to be critical, but it doesn't seem like any of the above is
taken into consideration and it's being debated without there being any
actual need or practical purpose.

Kitty