The Grokster ruling [LWN.net]

The Grokster ruling

Posted Jun 30, 2005 13:43 UTC (Thu) by alex (subscriber, #1355)
Parent article: The Grokster ruling

As someone who hacks on P2P software I have an interest in what the
next step of the media companies will be. If "they" submit well crafted license compatible patches that do effective filtering/warning of infringing use I'd be happy to push for inclusion of the code. However if their
response is to threaten law suits if developers don't implement features they want, or try to break the license ("its open source but you can't remove X") then I guess we will see the courts start making rulings more directly relevant to open source code.

My sympathy for Grokster is limited. Its certainly seems to me they based their model on saying "hey kids, you can get free copyrighted music with our
tools". They are not champions of FOSS.

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Stealth may be an issue

Posted Jul 1, 2005 0:23 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

One thing the ruling may mean is that it could be dangerous to release any P2P software that tries to be stealthy. If what is being uploaded/downloaded is not legal, the users will want to hide their activity, but if the use is legal (for example, using BitTorrent to download a Fedora distribution), hiding is counterproductive. Courts might conclude that any feature that has no use to legal, open users implies that you're a bad guy (even if there are valid and legal uses for such features).

We shall see

Posted Jul 1, 2005 15:52 UTC (Fri) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link]

Maybe. IANAL but I suspect it will take a test case or two. One would hope that something like Freenet would be ok as it is designed to be ananoymised publishing network for use in oppressive legislatures. The distributed trackers of Bittorrent should also be excempt as there are good non-piracy related reasons to have such an architecture.

I suspect trying to anonymise Gnutella could well be seen as trying to aid piracy, where I would argue current black listing measures are only trying to prevent damage to the network regardless of the bad nodes operator's status.

It depends on what the next move of RIAA/MPAA et all will be. Unfortunatly I suspect wielding the legal stick has become a habit for them :-(