Implications For Software Like Napster And Gnutella?

vsync64 asks: "My employer hosts the main Gnutella site, and with the recent ruling against Napster, our servers are being pretty much crushed by the flood of Napster refugees. I'm wondering how much longer people believe this software will be usable. Obviously, given past events such as the whole DeCSS thing, the software will never disappear. Since there is a long tradition of "piracy" and sharing, going back to world-writable FTP sites, IRC channels, and BBSes, the practice won't disappear. I'm just curious as to what options the government and major corporations have in trying to stop it. They could probably get the software removed from the main sites, and possibly enact legislation to criminalize 'systems [and software] for the primary purpose of violating copyright', but what would the media and the unwashed masses think of this? Could copyright violation become stigmatized, much as smoking has, or could such an action be the final straw that turns public opinion against the large corporations once and for all?"

Comments

Copyrights violations

[Anonymous Coward]

As much as I may dislike the current recording industry, I'd like to see copyrights remain an important (and supported) part of society.

Without copyrights, tools such as the BSD license and Gnu Public License, which allow open source development to happen with some modicrum of protection and safety, would not be possible.

I think it's possible to have both copyrights and relative freedom of information, and we need both. While information may "want to be free", we need a more developed sense of ethics online if we want other beneficial aspects of copyright to remain.

So?

[Have Blue]

What's wrong with "copyright violation becom[ing] stigmatized"? I think this would be a good thing. Big corporations would have less of a hair trigger when it came to the net, the door would be more open for a legitimate micropayment system (since it would no longer be the case that 99% of the audience wants/knows how to go it for free), and so on.

If you think copyright law is a bad thing (Disclaimer: I don't), then try to get the law changed. Don't just break the law and wait for someone else to change it for you.

so when does it become wrong...

[JudgePagLIVR]

to freely distribute information? So many of us balk at the shutdown of Napster; what if Napster had been distributing bomb-making instructions?

Would it have been okay to shut them down then? No? What if it were used to distribute the names and locations of people in the Witness Protection Program (That's in America, I don't know if other countries have something similar)?

or, while we're at it, what if Napster was being used to distribute your credit card number?

Napster wasn't shut down because it did anything illegal, it was shut down because in fervantly protection free speech, it failed to provide a reasonable system through which someone could request the removal of material that was harmful to them. True, the only people that were "harmed" were big and rich and greedy, but that doesn't mean that only BRG people *can* be hurt. If you had awakened one morning to find your name, address, phone number, cc #, and photos of you and your wife in bed being distributed through Napster, how would you have gotten them removed? Who would you have contacted? You would have had no options to solve the problem.

Systems like Napster are great, and the freedom they provide is an unarguably nessecary component, but there has to be some system to address the objections raised on a case by case basis.

Try using the service b4 you comment

[fishexe]

Napster wasn't shut down because it did anything illegal, it was shut down because in fervantly protection free speech, it failed to provide a reasonable system through which someone could request the removal of material that was harmful to them.

Sorry, that just isn't true. If it were, then email, irc, usenet and the web would all have to be shut down. To go to your example, I could post bombmaking instructions to any of them without being permanently removed. I could be using an anonymous remailer for three of them and for irc, they could ban my IP from the server but I would probably be at the library and could just go to one of the other myriad libraries in the area. Or I could take advantage of the fact that my ISP uses dynamic IPs and use a diff. username each time, but then I risk getting reported and tracked so I would prob. do the library thing. Napster was actually the /easiest/ protocol to deal with individual users on who were acting up. So you see any of these four major protocols is worse than napster. Napster was shut down because it's /primary purpose/ was exchange of mp3's, a majority of which were copyrighted, a majority of those by RIAA clients.

BTW photos can't be put up on Napster. have you ever even used the fscking service on which you are commenting? You can put mp3's in your directory for d/l and there are chat channels where you can type stuff. That's it. IRC is 100x more dangerous. Also if you didn't notice large numbers of ppl w/ mettalica songs were systematically removed from the system at one point. How hard would it be to do that to people doling out credit card numbers, as well as logging their IP to report to their provider? You can't hide behind a wall of anonymity with napster, at least not without being seriously being traceable, the way you can with other protocols. So then the law tracks them down and prosecutes them. Whereas we know of people distributing credit card numbers elsewhere online who haven't been caught.

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