Oh god. This thread is so fucking stupid it hurts. Educate yourselves before you decide to speak on an issue.
ps: P2P is not illegal. The betamax case makes this 100% clear. This case has nothing to do with the legality of P2P. This case has to do with the prosecutability of the coders of P2P software.
pss: Hey guess what. The US Supreme court rules in the…get this…UNITED STATES. Saying that this will be the end of P2P (see my first ps) is ridiculous, and even stupider because most client hubs/bt-sites ARN’T IN THE USA.
psss: Prosecuting law on the internet is almost impossible. Who decides who is responsible? Server owners? Server makes? The people hosting the content on the server? Users of the server? These things have never been decided, making prosecution almost impossible, and based 100% on hearsay and conjecture. “Cases” are rarely won or lost. Companies use barratary to scare their defendant into giving into their demands, or use meaningless threats to issue C&D orders. Remember when the RIAA was attacking 12 year old kids? Most of those people gave into the RIAA’s demands, without a case.
You know i downloaded that too? I downloaded the torrent to show you how to do it and accidentally left it on. I watched the entire series too, after accidentally downloading it
Who decides who is responsible? The Supreme Court does. That’s their job. They interpret the law. They decide, based on the law, who they think should be responsible. In this case, they think that coders of P2P clients can, amongst others, be held responsible. Because of this ruling, any company that feels their music is being stolen can sue the makers of any P2P client, and hold this ruling up in court as grounds to sue that coder. That doesn’t mean they’ll win every case, but it gives them some important footing that they didn’t have before. If the Supreme Court now goes about deciding that the end-user is also liable, or that person’s ISP is also liable, then that can hold up in court, too. Questions are no longer philosophical when they get to the Supreme Court, they simply become questions that must be answered. And, as it is their job to answer them, their answers are later used in interpretting the law.
Oh, and on an aside, it should be “ppps,” not “psss.” PS stands for “Post Script,” and “Post-Post-Post Script” makes a bit more sense than “Post Script Script Script.”
Other than that, I fully agree with you. This ruling isn’t going to change the face of P2P at all. Heck, I’m not even really familiar with those P2P clients.
[edit] I guess, technically, it stands for “post scriptum,” which, from my understanding, translates to “post script.”
On another semi-related tangent, how do you define an application with malicious intent? P2P can be written in <a href=“http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/tinyp2p.html”>only 15 lines of code</a>, thereby almost making it silly to “ban” such applications.
In other words, P2P networks/programs can only be prosecuted if they actively induce their subscribers/peers to download illegal material. That’s why Grokster and Morpheus are being taken down, because the industry has proven (or set up the steps towards proving) that they actually promote the idea that you can use their program to download illegal stuff. As long as any P2P network/program doesn’t do that, it’s good to go. BitTorrent in particular will be extremely tough to take down, even within the US.
As has been said, the Betamax issue of having legal as well as illegal uses is still alive and kicking, at least for now.
yeah, programs like limewire and bearshare that have you pay for their ad-ware-less programs (which are, duh, easily pirated), have EULA that basically tell you not to do it.
Legally, that’s all they need to do.
Well, I doubt that P2P will die that easily.
Especially when there’s stuff like “Piratbyrån”. “Piratbyrån” is Swedish for “The Pirate Bureau” which is sort of a parody company based on “Antipiratbyrån” (take a guess what that means :P) which was started by major companies in an attempt to stop piracy.
Piratbyrån is instead attempting to increase piracy and I think that they’re getting a much bigger result than Antipiratbyrån. (And Piratbyrån also sells T-Shirts :D)
And then of course there’s pages like Piratebay. Piratebay have received a lot of different threats of legal actions, but their reaction has always been the same. They’ve even got a warning message on their page saying that if you try to threaten them with legal actions your mail will be posted and will be ridiculed in front of thousands of net surfers.
I love that page.
I agree with that, but not with stealing material OTHER people have made so they can sell it for their own profit.
Saying that the solution to stoping piracy is to get rid of the means to do so, is punishing EVERYONE because of a few people’s mistakes. And thats evil, and evil is bad.
I’m not saying that, I’m saying I’m puzzled it was allowed to get this far. In any case, there’s no way to stop piracy now- the tech and software is out there, in the hands of millions of people, including many beyond the reach of Western Civilization’s laws. My guess is that the whole producer-consumer relationship is going to have to change, though how I have no definite idea.
You’ve just hit the nail on the head right there, in paticular with that last sentence. The problem now is getting the rest of the world to realize this =\
And though you’re correct that there is no way to stop the will to pirate…at some point, the option of paying for media outweighs that of stealing it. Encyption can go on forever, there will always be bigger bits and bigger key values, and at some point, why bother cracking 2832659867745043245 bit encryption, when you can just buy the song for 99¢?
EDIT: This is my personal opinion, really not related to the thread (that much), but whatever, here goes-
I think we (or…world leaders) need to sit down and define the internet before we go and make laws for it. And in my opinion, i think it should be defined as it’s own entity.
The problem with that is that you’d have to get the world leaders to actually agree on it first. I just don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon. Right now, countries like Singapore seem to love the fact that its people pirate American intellectual property and refuse to lift a finger to stop it, so how would you get them to agree on anything at all regarding copyright issues?
Even if by some miracle they’d agree that the Internet is “its own entity”, what laws would govern it? And which court would prosecute people? Not the ICC, which several countries, including the USA, don’t recognize. Again, huge debates, and in the end every country is for its own yet again.
1: The US Commerce Department just took control of ICANN
2: The FBI has admitted to acting as a host for top level warez sites, in a sting. They’ve already got the leaders of one top level, and have crippled the rest by forcing them to go into hiding. This sucks because EVERYTHING on the internet comes from these topsites. Do you really think that music you’re getting was “shared” by someone else?
I had to write back when I read this! It made me laught. The thought that went through my head the moment I read it was, “Yeah, it’s not like anything is original or unique any more anyways…” So yeah, get rid of it… ¬.¬
I downloaded the torrent to show you how to do it and accidentally left it on. I watched the entire series too, after accidentally downloading it 
