EFF To Defend Music Swapping Service MusicCity

MattW writes "Yahoo is carrying the CNET story that EFF has come to the defense of MusicCity, which produces peer-to-peer software, but does not run central servers as Napster did. EFF has a whitepaper on the Sony Betamax case, and it discusses the implications of various court decisions during the Napster case and their effect on it as a precedent. A MusicCity lawyer, who was responsible for the successful defense of the Rio, is quoted, astutely observing: 'This case shows more clearly (than Napster) that what the plaintiffs are most concerned about is control of technology. This is all about whether they can leverage copyrights into control over software development.' And that's truly what the RIAA's interest in Napster was about: not money, but control."

Comments

MusicCity or FastTrack?

[CaseyB]

MusicCity produces only the "shell" software. The guts of the system (which is common to Morpheus, Kazaa, and Grokster) is called FastTrack.

I'm not sure why the "shell" company is the target of the suit. Wouldn't it be more productive to attack FastTrack directly? After all, they're the company selling the real technology. I suppose the American company is easier go after.

From a legal standpoint, if a piece of software is composed of many different components from different vendors, who do you hold accountable if they collectively create an "illegal" whole? Would Netscape or MS be held responsible if someone wrote a FastTrack plugin for their browser?

Not a very nice description of EFF

[Erris]

The article's sound bite: The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which has represented hackers, cryptographers and computer scientists in its push for digital rights..

Is considerably at variance with the EFF's description of themselves. I'd say the EFF is closer to the truth. They represent all of us not just a minority that can be Reasonably And inconsequentially Discriminated against.

Gnutella

[CaptainSuperBoy]

Gnutella, although it's horribly inefficient, is just what you mentioned: Morpheus-like software that uses no central indexing server that can be shut down. The protocol is freely available and many open source clients exist.

The RIAA's approach to Gnutella thus far has been actively discovering copyright offenders and sending DMCA complaints to their ISP. The problem with Gnutella is that by design, everyone knows your IP.

What we really need, is a distributed storage network such as FreeNet. If I share my songs, the don't come from my computer - various parts of them are propagated to Bill's computer in Texas, Alice's computer in Canada, and Charlie's computer in Norway.. The RIAA is already having nightmares about this technology maturing. If software like this can become as efficient as Morpheus currently is, the RIAA's only hope would be SSSCA-type legislation that bans software such as FreeNet.

P-2-P for Linux Distributions...

[A Commentor]

Why hasn't Morpheus been used to distribute new Linux distributions. The last time that Mandrake and Red Hat were release, I looked on Morpheus and could not find the current release... I had to fight along with everyone else to get to a ftp server that would let me download.

Once I downloaded the ISOs, I put it in my files directory for Morpheus, but didn't notice anyone downloading it...

It could speed up the downloads (and require less bandwidth from their servers) if Redhat/Mandrake would put the files out on Morpheus to get shared.