In the end peer-to-peer has nothing to do with copyright. It's the way the Earth links.

For linking people and ideas, P2P is simply a better topology than client-server. It conforms to the way people are. Capitalism is a peer-to-peer economic system. Socialism is client-server. Democracy is a peer-to-peer political system. Autocracy is client-server.

The difference is just that stark.

The myth of the "Intellectual Property cult" is that the products of intellect are unique, complete, all-in-all. They are not. "If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants." That's Sir Isaac Newton.

This applies to all products of the intellect:

• The movie "Sky Captain" builds, not just on software, but on movies like Fritz Lang's Metropolis and the great science-fiction stories of the 1930s.
• M.C. Hammer's biggest hit, "Can't Touch This," was based on a sample from the late Rick James' hit "Superfreak."
• Frank Baum's "The Wizard of Oz" stories were a reaction to stories like Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland." The later work could not have happened without the former.

Until the idiocy of "business method patents" the U.S. Patent Office always assumed that new inventions could be built on old ones. To deny the right of people to sample other works, as a court recently held, is absurd on its face.

All this is a long-winded introduction to a new product of Earthlink research.

Earthlink calls it SIPshare . SIPshare demonstrates that the heart of Voice Over IP is that it's a peer-to-peer system. SIPshare uses the Session Initiated Protocol on which VOIP is built to create a true file-sharing system.

In the end it's no great leap. Earthlink is re-creating the business "grapevine," that invisible network that lets rumors become transmitted as facts before they're even announced. It's a natural, normal human process.

Try to ban the grapevine and you make humanity itself a copyright violation.