Every time something happens we react. That is the nature of what animals, and humans do after all.

We see rain, we take shelter. We are hot, we try to get cool and go for a swim. Totally human nature.

Of course, as humans, we have this capacity to plan as well. Companies and governments are great at planning because they can amass quite a considerable amount of brain power to do that planning. Come up with strategies, think of contingencies, and put in place supply chains.... we are pretty smart...

Unfortunately we aren't as smart as we think we are.

What most organizations just don't get, is that everything changed once we got digital technology. And at the moment the epitome of that technology is P2P. I am not saying that everything that is able to be delivered by P2P is good. Not by any means. But the fact remains that as long as the lawmakers and the politicians and the administrators all think that the way of the past continues as the way of the future all their plans will ultimately turn to crap.

Yes - crap.

I remember saying to a friend several years ago (he wasn't a friend at the time, he was the Chairman of a major Japanese electronics company) that "Technology should serve humanity. Humanity should not serve technology."

Similarly the law should serve society and not the other way around.

It is quite reasonable that the lawyers and and barristers who have spent their lives trying to improve the legal system should feel that once they have achieved the changes that they believed were needed things should then be as close to perfect as possible and should be allowed to remain in that state.

Of course the problem for them and for that point of view is that technological change, particularly that change wrought by digital technology, has impact on what society does. And the law is meant to serve society as a whole, and not just the traditional owners of copyrights.

So as P2P grows in momentum, so too does the need for the laws to change once again, to reflect continuing societal change.

That is just a minor part of things though.

P2P maybe acutely visible in the area of music and movies and content as a whole. It is not yet a visible force in medicine, finance and energy.... (now Tom will no doubt disagree with me, but he is always ahead of the curve).

The fact is that it is coming.

P2P will become a major force in our lives over the next few years.

What we have to really and truly understand is that it is not bad. It is not necessarily good either. But it is not bad. What is bad is that people tend to demonize (there is that word again) any technology that doesn't do what they want it to do. And P2P will absolutely not adhere to the previous modes of thought. Nor the business models that go with them.

P2P is an accelerant. It is like adding gasoline to a fire. It makes things go faster. And for a lot of businesses - and for governments too - going faster is a problem. They want things to just continue at the same pace, with a whole lot of predictability too.

P2P doesn't allow that kind of planning. It enables random events to take place.

Life is going to present us with more and more of those random events. And boy, does that have the politicians worried. Those who get the whole idea of continuing and accelerating change, that is. For years people have been talking about a future of citizen journalism and blogging and Web 2.0 etc. Some people have pooh poohed the concept. They say that bloggers are irrelevant because they don't do research, they don't do proper investigative journalism. That is quite true of a lot of people that put their thoughts out online. But these same people act as amplifiers of ideas. They are the people that give rise to the meme. They are the people that push the buttons of others with the eventual outcome being that change takes place.

We have to hope that the change that is coming is going to be good... But on the other hand, could it be worse than what we have....?