Why not a gift culture file-swapping network?
Having used Napster, gnutella and now eDonkey, I think P2P software is starting to have the idea backwards. File sharing is no longer an exchange culture, it's a gift culture.
If you have not read Eric S. Raymond's article Homesteading the Noosphere, you really should. Even more than The Cathedral and the Bazaar it explains the motivations behind software writers' decisions to make their source code available to everyone, and the (software) culture reasons this doesn't lead to infinite versions of every program.
Briefly, exchange culture is what we are familiar with: exchanging money for goods. Gift cultures are rare, but occur when anything of interest exists in abundance. Imagine a small group living in a jungle--all foods and materials known exist in abundance. What, then, defines status? One's ability to give away goods.
File swapping software seems to assume what you search for is scarce, and so you search for files that either are found or not. I argue that what is scarce is space to store all the music on one's CDs & DVDs, not the CD's & DVDs themselves. As such, sensible swapping software would show lists of requests not files. If I owned all the music of an obscure band, I could direct the filters of my P2P client to show me the most requested tracks by that artist, make those available, and be perceived as a great giver. Perhaps the software could award priority to the searches of great givers. This then turns the oft-seen "leech" problem on its head. Leeches would see their searches fail often, as the software would observe their low-priority and drop them to handle the higher priority searches of great givers.
Now hopefully either someone will tell me why I'm clueless, or implement such a beast.
