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Sought for MGM v. Grokster: Non-Infringing P2P Use
linuxizer writes "Since my last Slashdot entry, I've been discussing various copyright issues with the ever-interesting Peter Fader. Out of those conversations came sniu.info, an attempt to document the various forms of substantial, non-infringing use over peer-to-peer networks before MGM v Grokster goes to the Supreme Court. So far I have about 50 entries, but more suggestions would be much appreciated.
Some fellow /. readers might also be interested in my fairly regular posts on copyright/IP issues, which are mostly links to interesting articles with occasional commentary."
I use the P2P network to get free copies of Brittany Spears' latest album. Since it is not spelled "Britney", it does not infringe, so back off, MGM!
World of Warcraft by Blizzard utilizes the BitTorrent methods to distribute patches/updates. That's basically rousing support for a peer-to-peer method from a very well known company servicing several hundred thousand users.
World of Warcraft distributes patches via a customised BitTorrent client.
Janie took my gun...
It may just be me who can't spot it in the list, but where is using BitTorrent to distribute the latest ISO images for Linux installs? Not to mention all the patches etc...
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
For some reason kazaa claims that it's service is 100% legal though.h tm
http://www.kazaa.com/us/help/new_100percentlegal.
And how about the service named "Ares"? Why arent they being targeted aswell?
First of all the article's title is misleading. It makes you think that in a recent event a non-infringing use is actually being requested in the court. Second of all the article should be submitted to ask-/. not yro.
Some guy downloaded the GIMP from me over Gnutella a couple of weeks ago, but I'm afraid I don't have any proof.
I am trolling
bt.etree.org for distributing legally traded music via torrents? Along with various other P2P protocols for doing the same thing (FurthurNET, etc).
I've never used BitTorrent for anything BUT legal activities. It comes in very handy for downloading ISO images of various Linux distributions. I personally have never even seen a link to an "illegal" torrent.
Durring the beginning of the Iraq war, I used P2P to get video and pictures that were censored from the US. The instant I hear about pictures, recordings, etc. on another network they can't show in the US, I go find them on P2P. Along with that search, I also found pictures that solders had taken along the way. Then I found gunship video (de-classified and classified because it had altitude/other readings) showing people walking into a building. The order came, and they leveled the building. Then started firing on anyone leaving the scene. You could actually see the men get thrown around after getting hit with munitions. On, and this video just happened to show one man running into a mosque so he was let go. (sure it wasn't leaked on purpose)
how about http://www.legaltorrents.com/ URL says it all...
We use P2P (JXTA) in our food traceability project. Users keep their data locally but allow others within their group to access the data to build the required product documentation. This is done to comply with upcomming EU and US legislation.
"If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!" -- "Ma" Ferguson, Governor of Texas (circa
As the list implicitly acknowledges with the '10% of users are legitimate', most users of standard P2P networks DO use them to infringe on copywrites. This list is very suspicious in that many of the items it lists are new and/or unadopted P2P networks, some of which really couldn't be used for infringing materials. IANAL, but it seems to me all this could accomplish is a court banning current P2P implementations in favor of more heavily regulated or restrictively designed ones that cannot easily be used to distribute the latest music.
This is not to argue that shutting down the system to stop the 90% of pirating users is the right way to go, but it seems like in the court case over a specific P2P implementation, it might be a mistake to point to 50 other implementations which don't suffer the same problems.
Assault rifles can be used for hunting, target practice, target competition, and recreational shooting (as can most guns).
Assault rifles, and guns in general, aren't "evil" or are built to serve nefarious purposes.
Similarly, P2P networks can solve a host of distribution issues.
It's the idiots that use them for illegal purposes (assault rifles, guns, or P2P networks) that cause the problems. Since the world is made up mostly of idiots, well... there you go.
I run FreeAudio.org. The goal is to create audiobooks of the most important literary works on liberty and freedom. I regularly share our first work: Frederic Bastiat's classic book "The Law" via LimeWire. The works are intended to be downloaded and shared. (You can even post them on your website as long as the copyright info is kept intact.) Sometime today or tomorrow, I'll be posting our second work: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. With both of these works, there is a statement at the beginning encouraging people to share them "via their favorite file sharing service." So, not only is sharing via P2P allowed, it is encouraged. (Add one more to your list.)
Vendetta Online also uses BitTorrent to patch.
Don't forget that it's legal to download pretty much anything as long as it's for evaluation purposes and you delete it after a maximum of 24 hours.
Want to distribute 700MB files all over the world w/o breaking your own backbone? Knoppix provides a torrent link that lets you DL it's live CD distribution from the bittorrent network rather than the choked FTP servers (which are often 7-10kb/sec).
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
... And they're right. (the usual disclaimer: IANAL). It is 100% legal to have Kazaa. Even after you get infringing content with it, the program itself is still legal.
Grokster is a business. If you couldn't use it to trade infringing copies, I'm afraid the service would have no commercial viability whatsoever. The mere fact that it's CAPABLE of exchanging noninfringing files I don't think is sufficient justification.
A better case, perhaps, could be made for bittorent.
Right now I am using BitTorrent to download disk images of the X Live CD written about here on /. a few days ago and Fedora Core 3. I can't really think of any better examples of a legal use of a "p2p" network. I think BitTorrent is an especially good idea for OSS as it allows free software to be distributed in a manner that lowers the bandwidth usage of the host providing the software.
SIGFAULT
It's not too difficult to find people using bittorrent to distribute linux ISOs these days. I just grabbed a set of Debian 3.1. Works like a charm!
In fact, nothing works better. This is so much a viable use, that I don't really believe any more proof of bittorrent is necessary. But hey, the more the better I suppose.
between systems like BT versus Kazaa and Grokster. Their network structures are inherently different and as such must be considered independently.
Legal uses of BitTorrent have been shown, but legit uses of Kazaa and Grokster are slim from what I've seen.
You might argue that you could distribute public domain works, or GPL works, over Kazaa/Grokster but for things like Linux ISOs, BT works better and for low priority things HTTP and FTP work quite well.
And please, people, don't bring up the "we should make all X illegal" analogy.
And on top of that, even if somehow weird dimension where you live where that might even be true, Civil Lawsuits require you to to prove your innocence. You would still have to go to court, pay out the nose, to prove you innocence. And based on some crap you heard on the internet. Which isn't true, btw.
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
... and if it is that hard to find it being used legitimately, then maybe the tool or protocol itself is illegitimate? HTTP, FTP all have clear legit uses, I'd say they are in the clear. Kind of like fully automatic weapons. You could use it for self-defense, but it is so deadly and used so much for bad things that I can't support general citizens owning one. I realize that guns and P2P aren't nearly the same issue, I thought that part was similar enough for the illustration.
Even if it is legit, bittorrent is primarily a cost-shifting measure that I really can't support, IMO.
The BBC is apparently considering using P2P for the distribution of their archives once it goes live.
We Build Beautiful Websites
While you're at it, would you also consider banning other products that do not match your exalted standards of "usefulness"?
Alcohol, perhaps, because it only promotes wife-beating and dangerous driving?
A case for computer games, because they promote violence and are merely for entertainment??
To repeat ad nauseum, a tool, software or hardware, is only a tool and are not inherently good or evil. The responsibility of "correct" usage lies with the users, and only with the users. If we go by your myopic way of thinking, we would all be suitably safe, suitably reassured, and suitably living in the stone age.
Latest slackware distribution was first released only on BT.
http://ebgp.net/ccc/
Half-Life 2 used STEAM to deliver their product, which was a custom BITTorrent protocol.
/. posts which put up Bittorrents of files of Websites to avoid Slashdotting.
They Even Hired Bram Cohen (guy who wrote 1st Bittorrent client-invented/popularised and coded it) to write it for them.
What about
Isn't the BBC (British Broadcasting) trialing a TIVO like streaming T.V. thing at the moment using Peer-2-Peer tech.
And didn't Downhill Battle help people get WINXP-service hack 2 by Bittorrent.
I'm sure with Downhill Battles Blog-to-Torrent legality will really take off.
Otherwise : A World Without Sharing.
I'm not sure if this is too dissimilar or not, but using peer to peer networks for backups should generally be non-infringing.
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
Isn't porn sharing one of the main uses of P2P? A lot of porn is homemade and has no copyright. Maybe Jerry Falwell and the FRC don't like it, but its legal and a legitimate use of free speech.
Anarchy Online is currently being distributed via BitTorrent.
The whole system worked very nice for me.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Eve, the MMORPG posted a bittorrent link when they updated their client for faster downloads. It WAS faster to download that way too, much much faster. The link is still there: http://www.eve-online.com/patches/patches.asp
if they want to go after bittorren, which is being used legally all over the place, they might as well shut down IRC and usenet too. because...well...IRC and usenet are the CORE of piracy. except for their legit uses also (community). naturally, if IRC got shutdown, i think heads would soon be chopped off. i dont think anyone but pirates would notice if usenet went away, though. /pirate
Ok, can someone Canadia please make a P2P program and run it from up here. YOU ARE SAFE HERE.
One of the legal uses of P2P networking listed is ringtone sharing, but ringtones are the same as any other form of music: the owner of the copyright dictates whether anyone is allowed to copy them or not. This means that ringtones based on chart music or TV theme tunes, for example, cannot legally be copied.
It's not uncommon these days for a record company to make more money from a ringtone of a single than the actual CD sales, so I wouldn't be surprised if they got upset about them being shared freely.
Free music you can copy
-This would make P2p illegal and probably a host of similar software.
-USA would then be compared to China in anal retention.
Then one of 2 things will happen:
-All the fun (and illegal) things in computers would not happen in the USA. Patents will also drive interesting stuff away too. USA would have to buy all good tech stuff from outside the country, eventhough it would illegal. Joe consumer would either leave the country (if he can afford it) or join some militia for civil war.
-Congress smartens-up and fixes the copywrong and patents laws so that innovation stays in the USA. The US might fall a bit from grace but not flat on its face. Alas this won't happen: too much greed in the US government today.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Ummm. there were no video/picture that were "censored from the US".
Except for the more graphic images of US military personel torturing foreigners. And killing them during "questioning." And the bodies of US service men coming home. And who knows what else, because when stuff is being censored you don't necessarily know it.
Remember, this is the country that routinely dropped colour from video taken "behind the iron curtain", leaving the impression that everything there was black-and-white. The country that loudly objected to the development of biological weapons anywhere, by anyone, until some of our congress critters got mailed samples of weaponized anthrax we had made in our biological weapons labs. Oops.
Our legislators pass laws without reading them, in some cases without being allowed to read them and/or discuss them, and we pass laws which average citizens are not allowed to own a copy of.
If you think there are no images censored from the US, you are nuts.
--MarkusQ
The web site www.kongisking.net uses bit torrent to distribute Peter Jackson's production diaries from his filming of King Kong.
While your sentiment is clear, your object choice does not lend itself to its use. The so-called "assault weapons" are not used by criminals. They're too heavy, too loud, cost too much. Just like bolt-action rifles. Also, 99% of firearms are never used in a crime.
It is a rare criminal that isn't wearing clothes. Clothes are the choice of criminals! We must make clothes illegal, or at least license them tightly, to prevent their abuse by criminals.
How about an automobile dealer instead? What if an automobile dealer found out that 99% of their cars were used to speed, run stop signs, tailgate? Show me a driver who never commits a "crime". Or rather, "infraction"?
Would they still be "justified" in selling cars?
I've never seen a car on the road with a US Government license plate that wasn't speeding. There's a big clue there about the difference between inanimate objects "used in crimes" and the people who commit crimes.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Isn't PVFS2 a P2P sort of system?.. underlying protocol uses peers to create a virtual disk. This takes the idea of P2P as a protocol instead of a piece of end-user software.
The OMR is a music registry for copyleft or public domain music. It lists a couple hundred artists and many more songs, from many genre. Unfortunately, it recently went down. it was too expensive to host as a traditional web archive.
I've talked with its maintainer about running it, and I'll be re-openning it for the new year, only because I'm building it for use with bittorrent. I have a measly 33KB/s uplink and couldn't begin to host the site otherwise. But between me as the archive and a couple of friends who can keep a duplicate of many of the songs on bigger links, we ought to be able to provide decent D/L speeds and get this project going again. Without P2P -- popular, well used, well supported p2p -- we wouldn't have a good path forwards.
Thanks for the opportunity to chime in and say thanks for the technology!
UseNet, IM, and FTP could all be considered P2P.
The King Kong website has been distributing production diary videos and interviews with Director Peter Jackson, et al via torrent for the upcoming movie.
http://www.kongisking.net/index.shtml
The Humanist Movement, an international umbrella of groups and organizations, distributes its materials in many ways, one of which is p2p.
It's a great way of making available a large amount of information, like long videos, audio, and archived information.
To see it, install winMX, find channel "LUNA", open a server, and there's the largest store of their videos, audio, text, and archives.
Many languages, but mostly Spanish, French, Italian, and English.
winMX was chosen because it supports many languages.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
While it was never official, all of the Project Gutenberg books are shared out by some people on DC networks.
http://torrent.unix-ag.uni-kl.de:6969/
.ISO were gathered from the mirror sites. I think BitTorrent would be a better way, and will suggest it.
Knoppix has been using BitTorrent for distribution for a while. I think it's an excellent example for other distributions.
Debian tried to use a distributed system where the packages for the
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
... we're supposed to come up with reasons that lawsuits against P2P hosts should move from a strict liability regime to a negligence regime?
We're not quite ready for that yet. Sorry.
One of the best examples of a P2P network that I havn't really seen done too well yet is a local distributed storage solution. The idea here is that you have some huge datastore (such as a file system or a database) where you want to put the data into the datastore and allow other individuals on the local network to be able to fish the data out.
The point here is that by going the P2P route rather than a fixed central server model, you both balance the network bandwith, particularly for "distant" nodes, and you allow the redundancy that the internet is so hyped over (you can nuke any node and the rest will compensate) but in practice is far from the truth. In theory you can still lose some data, but with a well built P2P network of this nature that could be minimized, and only seldom accessed data would be the most vunerable.
Another big plus of this is that not only does this type of storage system work well for limited bandwidth, you can also install more modest "almost thin terminals" into such a network that keeps only frequently accessed data locally, and other nodes can compensate with data storage elsewhere.
Unfortunately, I havn't seen any really good examples of this. Freenet comes close in theory, but even that has some ways to go to do this effectively.
I always use Direct Connect to download linux isos and similar. The problem is that my uni is quite strict on downloads outside of the internal network - more than 400mb/day and you're stuffed. They do have an internal mirror but it only has a couple of distros on (lame). So my mates and I wget an iso each then share them.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
"I lost X and for whatever reason cannot punish Y so I must lobby to have tool T outlawed." or "If not for tool T I would still have X so I must sue/lobby."
http://torrent.unix-ag.uni-kl.de:6969/
Knoppix, at least, does so.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
A Bit Offtopic: But Slashdot provided much of the info required for designing and building the recording device and to my knowledge there is none like it elsewhere.
I
One of the things I have used the P2P clients (any and all) for is for finding and downloading Anime Fan Pictures. Easiest way to get a couple hundred pics of a series at once rather than trying to find fansites and dloading an image archive one at a time.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
1 - Getting legal to re-distribute software and information more efficiently then only using the base FTP sites..
2 - time-shifting of broadcast TV shows that i have a legal right to record, but missed due to any number of reasons.
3 - Sharing your own produced content ( such as music ) in order to broaden your listener base without the cost of 'main stream' advertising.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Both Filerush.com and 3dgamers.com use BitTorrent for legal torrent downloads of game demos and videos. Filerush.com (sorry for tooting my own horn) allows people to submit legal files of any kind, and we'll add our high bandwidth seeds.
Podcasters are starting to use BitTorrent as a way to effectively distribute their non-copyright-infringing shows without choking their own bandwidth pipe.
Here's one tutorial on it.
-Augie
Or do they still use BitTorrent....?
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
Assault rifles can be used for all those purposes. However, what differentiates an assault rifle from a 'normal' rifle is its intent. The added features of an assault rifle are mostly for suppresive fire and tactical control of a situation, which you will never do in any competition inspired by non-military uses of rifles.
You're not gonna be able to kill a dear any more reliably with an assault rifle, nor flocks of birds, unless extremely concentrated and close such. And then virtually nothing will be left of the individual birds.
As for competitions as a justification for anything in general, how about these kinds of competitions: Tank maneuvering. Tank target practice. Fighter/bomber target practice.
Do you believe those should be allowed for anyone for the sake of fun and recreation?
I'm not sure exactly where I stand on the whole gun control issue, but logically this analogy doesn't hold water, and as such may backfire if used towards media and legislators.
How about this... integrate the bittorrent protocol into web browswers, so websites can distribute their content in p2p with just a tag. Like, heavy images for example.
t " title="My 2MB astronomical image of the earth" />
<img src="bittorrent://http://mywebsite/myimage.torren
Just a thought.
Yeah, but have you stopped beating your wife?
I don't know if it is infringing or not but when Diebold was playing whack-a-server I got their memos over P2P. In fact that's why I installed the software I am using. I had used Napster and then Kazaa but Kazaa's whole spyware/wreck your system part soured me to it for a really long time. When I decided to learn more about the Diebold situation, I found that any website that showed up in Google had been suppressed so I was pretty much forced to install and use P2P software to access that information.
Of course this is the US so 1st amendment arguments might not get very far.
Bravo.
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Our legislators pass laws without reading them, in some cases without being allowed to read them and/or discuss them, and we pass laws which average citizens are not allowed to own a copy of.
Since you're making the assertion, care to back it up? I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying that you can't spout off that kind of stuff (especially that there are laws on the books, copies of which average citizens may not posess)
Also, I'm sure there are legislators who choose not to read laws they vote for, but I would like some evidence that they are barred from doing so and not just lazy. Also, you have missed the point of the post you responded to. The images discussed, censored or not, were from Iraq, not the US. They may have been censored by the US federal government, but that's different.
http://xkcd.com/386/
How about everytime someone posts a link to something cool on slashdot and the native server of the resource crumbles under the load? Usually, some thoughtful soul throws up a .torrent to it so the rest of the people who want to just download it (or even RTFA) can get to it.
I run YouServ, a hybrid web-based p2p system, within IBM. It is used by thousands for work-oriented content sharing.
I think one of the things MGM is forgetting is that yelling for contributory negligence on the part of a vendor such as Grokster, Morpheus, et al means that MGM will soon be out of business for producing films that urge people to commit violent crimes.
Should such a religious change to our laws (basically the "Am I not my brother's keeper?" question) should never be allowed into our laws or court system. If you think about it, our whole basis for our life here is the statement that everyone is entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. No where does the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, or the Bill of Rights say that we are all responsible for what everyone else does. All of it just states that we are responsible for our own actions. Which is why a murderer is put on trial and not his friends, enemies, family, and the like (so long as they did not participate of course). It is the same with these companies. Just because they make a piece of software which could be used in a harmful way against companies such as MGM is no excuse to hold them responsible for another party's usage of their software. Just like it is no excuse to hold a VCR production company responsible for how a VCR is used. Or Radio Shack for carrying the parts necessary to build a cable box which circumvents the cable company's security measures. Or Intel because its CPU chips were used to create a new virus. The allusions are ridiculous. The entire country can not function if such a law were passed. George Bush's "We are a litigious society," will be absolutely true. For no company will be able to function under such a law.
I believe that, as Americans, we should all go out and file lawsuits against every major company for psychological damage to our brains for being asked to function under laws which contradict the very basis of the manner in which this country was not only founded (ie: Freedom to do as you please) but to even work in this country (ie: If you get a job then you have denied someone else that very job).
Think about it. You really can't even respond to this message because you will have broken the copyright laws as they now stand. Why? Because you have to first get my permission to even reference this message. We ignore that here and respond anyway but this is just another example of common sense versus stupidity when it comes to crafting laws.
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
And yet all ISP's appear to either throttle your upload beyond a fair ratio to download or charge you through the nose for a decent upload/dowload ratio.
Maybe it will change somewhet once enough large companies realise the cost savings on using bittorrent and higher upload rates are more demanded.
http://fedora.redhat.com/download/#download points to http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/ which hosts the fedora torrents.
Blender, that wonderful open-source 3D rendering/modelling application, has a bunch of tutorial videos which are distributed using BitTorrent (to ease the load on their servers). Unfortunately, because of the negative publicity around P2P software, our administrators have blocked BitTorrent traffic and I have to use the mirror site to download them.
It's worth noting that all the congressmen who received the "Antrax letters" had voted against the Patriot Act.
Well, it would be worth noting, if it were true. The anthrax letters were mailed to Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, who voted for the Patriot Act, just like every other Senator except Russ Feingold.
Remember, this is the country that routinely dropped colour from video taken "behind the iron curtain", leaving the impression that everything there was black-and-white.
Er, surely leaving the impression that film there was black and white?
I suspect that even the TV viewing public might hesitate to go "oh, the video's black and white... that means that THE REDS ARE MONOCHROME!!"
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Hey guys, why don't you take a look at the timestamp before you're so quick to hand out a "-1 Redundant". This post was made at 10:10, the exact same time as the identical post. Man, if I had mod points I'd knock you back up man, but I don't. Sorry.
The problem here is that you little boys aren't ready for so powerful a toy. The government SHOULD take it away until everyone can get their heads out of their asses and use it for good.
Many business computer users have large capacity disk drives in their desktop machines and only use a small fraction of this capacity. Let's take an example small to medium size business with about 1000 desktop PCs. If each machine has a modest 20GB of excess disk space that's 20,000GB of unused storage. This space is a corporate asset and it's not being fully utilized.
Imagine a P2P system with a central index, security, and version control functionality. Using such a system, one could take advantage of the excess disk capacity on desktop system to create a virtual file server. Furthermore, once a given file exists on, say, three or more desktop P2P servers there is no longer a need to back it up.
P2P software is not yet enterprise ready and, unfortunately, if the **AA get their way it will never reach the maturity necessary to be anything other than a file trading system.
The most obvious (to me) non-infringing use of P2P would be the peer to peer store and forward protocol of Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), or what we have all come to know and love as e-Mail. The thing is that the whole of the Internet is designed around smart end-points, stupid but resilient middle. Client/server use, such as HTTP is essentially an overlay network -- the core of the Internet is all peer to peer.
LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
Don't know that I can give references either, but I have heard the same thing. I'll just clarify it a little...
Some pieces of legislation were delivered from the committee to the Congressional offices less than an hour before the scheduled votes. It's not that someone held a gun to their heads and said, "Don't read this, but vote on it!" It's just that delivery was arranged so that there was no time to read it.
I seem to recall that some very high-profile, "can't vote no without a darned good reason," legislation was passed this way. But at the moment, that factoid is fuzzier than the original topic.
My usual news sources are NPR and BBC, though I've been told that both are flaming liberal puppets, and I should be using Fox News as a more balanced source.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The preferred method of distributing unlicensed anime subs is through using Bittorrent, have a look at http://www.animesuki.com/
I am not the grandparent poster, but hey, it's an open forum...
The laws I believe the grandparent poster is referring to are copyrighted building codes.
As far as legislators not being able to read a bill before voting for or against it, well, that is up to the leadership of the legislature. They set the schedule, and decide when a vote occurs. In a few cases, such as the so-called PATRIOT act and the recent omnibus spending bill, the bill was introduced and voted upon without time being given for the legislators to read the contents of the bill. Sometimes things get snuck in.
Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 has a section that deals with Congress not reading the PATRIOT Act before passing it.
On his site, Moore has a page dealing with backing this claim up, "Congress did not read the Patriot Act before voting on it"
(I'm posting anonymously since I've already moderated (which means I'm also not the OP))
The band Ween is setting up their own p2p client (they say it will be based on BitTorrent) for exactly that purpose.
They already allow fans to tape their shows, and they want to enable them to trade high quality copies for free. Pretty cool.
Some applications use p2p networks to provide updates of their software to users. For example, Steam (think HL2 and CounterStrike: Source) and Azureus. And, there are probably more I don't know about.
Not my assertion, but how about John Gilmore's efforts to reveal the Show ID to Fly requirement that apparently is a law we're not allowed to see. Bearing in mind that it's quite easy for conspiracy theorists to purport nonexistant secret laws, this at least has the appearance of one that does.
As for barring reading of laws to be voted on, I cannot cite a blatent example of such. However, the Patriot Act was voted on several hours after a new version was printed (running several hundred pages). It is not clear that there was full understanding of the updated text prior to the vote (this is still a subject of debate).
Er, surely leaving the impression that film there was black and white?
Well yeah, people knew that the Soviet Union did, in fact, have the full color spectrum. But anyone who's into film can tell you that presenting a shot in black and white will give a different effect than full color.
Showing shots of the SU in B&W reinforced the image of a dreary, 'dead' society. Not that lving behind the Iron Curtain was any picnic (or so I'm told), but this lack of color in video was clearly a propaganda tactic.
Transmission films (www.transmissionfilms.com) uses Overnet to distribute DRM'd content.
Assault rifles ...aren't "evil" or are built to serve nefarious purposes.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a 2nd ammendment supporter all the way. But just to play devil's advocate...
They are called 'Assult Rifles' for a reason. They are designed to serve the purpose of a military assult. They were not designed for hunting or target practice - they were designed to be efficient killing devices in a combat situation. I guess it's up to you whether or not this is a 'naferious' purpose. I sure do.
I agree with your point 100% though.
Well Anarchy online's free 1 year trial is being distributed via bittorrent.
IANAL and all that, but I seem to recall that porn is not copyrighted. The US constitution allows copyright for "promotion of the science and useful arts". IIRC the supreme court as said that pron is not a useful art, therefore it is not copyrighted.
This was before the DMCA, and the like, so I don't know if it applies, but you might want to ask your lawyer if something goes to court.
There are a LOT of (legal) concert recordings that are available online. Many old GD fans look online trying to find that one concert with that they absolutely need. How is grokster or anyone supposed to keep track of which songs are legal to swap?
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
I'm a big fan of listening to video game music remixes created by fans. One of my favourite sites is: http://remix.overclocked.org
To reduce their network traffic sharing these fan made musical creations, they've created torrents, which they seed all the time for anyone wanting to download large batches of songs. They figure they'll be having to provide 100% of the downloads normally, so even if only two people are on the torrent at once, they get at least part of their network load lessened.
Depending the legality of fan made music, I'd consider this a great use of P2P.
Censoring, for airing or print due to the images being excessively graphic is not the same as banning them from US borders.
There is nothing illegal acquiring those images or owning them (unlike, say child porn or classified documents).
Dont be so quick to jump on the tinfoil hat bandwagon and say that the US really tries to stop its citizens from accessing information.
as well as free media (movies/music) that is not copywrighted is often most easily spread via bittorrent or other p2p clients.
True, an author can abandon his or her exclusive rights under copyright in a work, but how does even the author of a work know that the work isn't under someone else's copyright?
We used Bittorrent to distribute the Croquet developer's release with great success. Also, the system itself is a p2p collaboration architecture. See .
http://www.eff.org/IP/P2P/MGM_v_Grokster/ sez:
>This case raises a question of critical importance at the border between copyright and innovation: when should the distributor of a multi-purpose tool be held liable for the infringements that may be committed by end-users of the tool?
This and the invitation for sharing legal purposes is pointless - the problem is not in legal but illegal use.
And why should the distributor of the tool be held liable? Because the fuckos didn't bother to implement basic checking/policing in the code.
The other day an expert witness said that should have been fairly easy. (And why didn't they do that? Because they didn't WANT - lower coding costs, increase popularity of the software. Well they've must have saved enough to pay for expenses they'll incur along the way in this lawsuit).
Someone compared P2P to guns - distributors are liable if they don't do basic background checks on potential customers. If they require the same level of due dilligence on content that goes thru P2P software, what's the big deal?
Reminds me of LA Confidential. Forget why now, but it definitely does. Probably something in regards to Danny DeVito and the B&W underbelly of Hollywood.
"A better example is the classic MPAA vs Sony argument (I think it was sony. the VHS case). MPAA thought it would be the death of the film industry, that it would let massive piracy take place. It didn't. VHS had plenty of valid uses, and some not-so-legitimate."
There's more to it than that. Courts also look at the predominance of use as well. At best that'll invite regulation, rather than a ban.
Also as often reminded here. Digital is not analog. There's a difference between a degraded copy, verses an exact copy. So while we can walk away with some lessons from the MPAA vs Sony case. We can't carry the analogy were it hasn't gone.
Wow, a crime that has it's own punishment attached.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Isn't groove.net based entirely on p2p?
There are 50 LEGAL uses for P2P network software!!!?! That's like saying that we don't all use the Internet for pr0n!
While iFolder is proprietary Novell Pay-thru-the-nose server based software for sharing files between work and home (and anywhere else) they have open sourced a version of this (found here) which would count as P2P software with a perfectly legitimate use, and corporately backed as well.
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
That's nice, but we're not trying to prove that one person out of a million is using the system for noninfrinfging use. But that there's a predominance of non-infinging use. Unfortunately the pirates are working just as hard to prove otherwise, as is everyone here is trying to prove legitimacy. This merely proves that people are attacking the symptoms, and not addressing the underlying cause. Educate people that illegal file sharing is wrong, and that there are legitimate alternatives to satisfying their wants. Otherwise get use to evermore battles like this.
Anyone consider using P2P as a replacement for archie? Or that P2P is even an evolution of archie?
Archie was an FTP database search client. Freeware and shareware sites would publish what they have, archie would search those databases for programs, and then connect to the FTP site and download the software.
P2P programs are a live version of this, dynamically updating, mirroring the high demand content, and in some cases distributing the load of distribution better than a set of mirroring FTP sites.
Archie and FTP may have fallen in popularity to the web's rise, but P2P distribution of shareware and freeware programs should be a natural progression of this service.
Add in some web content pushing and P2P software searches could even supplant Google. Searches would turn up sharers which could host HTML pages for each file they share. You could download the page first to be sure you'll be pulling down what you expect, and it can still be used by the original publisher to track how often their software is P2P-shared.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
There is nothing illegal acquiring those images or owning them (unlike, say child porn or classified documents).
You can legally possess classified documents. Remember the Pentagon Papers? The person responsible for them who originally disseminated them could get in trouble though.
It is not clear that there was full understanding of the updated text prior to the vote (this is still a subject of debate).
This happens all the time, especially with omnibus finance and transportation bills. The final version (all several thousand pages of it) often comes out of conference with only hours to spare before the vote.
Which didn't work... "Undoing moderation to Comment X"
I remember reading an article about scientists that share data (bio/genomic data, astronomical data, etc.) via BitTorrent. Sorry can't remember where I saw the article or who it quoted. I would imagine that BitTorrent would have pretty obvious uses for sharing large amounts of scientific data.
Up with azerus, definitely tied for the top place as the best bittorrent client (doesn't use java like azerus).
www.bittornado.com
Has no spyware in it.
A big scene that exists in the P2P is the trading of dance clips. Local and foreign "poppers", breakers, lockers, house dancers, etc., share their videos and footage from events on P2P networks. A great example would be the "POPPING" room in Soulseek, where you can browse the user's files in there and see the names of the files being shared (so you can compare them to other networks). It helps to know the names of dancers, so do searches for Mr Wiggles, j-rock, salah, sally sly, tetris (soh), mr re, tommy boy, and bionic man for starters.
I mean, even if we were to submit that P2P was used for distributing copyrighted material, distributing copyrighted material isn't necessarily infringement. Specifically, if it's the copyright holder who instigates the distribution, P2P becomes a wholly legal distribution method.
IANAL, but any musicians out there who want to help the P2P cause, I'd say start sharing some samples of your work. Put something in the ID3 tag saying what your license is, and distribute even a few songs. Then, if someone sues to shut down the network, counter-sue for a violation of your freedom of speech. Argue they're asking the government to shut down your method of distribution without any compensation or something. Seems like a clever lawyer should be able to make some kind of case.
Earlier this year, Blender released the Blender Demo Reel via BitTorrent. This was a reel of projects created using Blender 3D software.
ah yes.. I stand corrected. thanks.
Every major OS for the last decade has been a p2p client. If you share a drive/directory/folder, and another user shares a drive/directory/folder, you have a peer to peer network.
Unless "the powers that be" are willing to ban every OS that has file sharing, any ban on p2p will be nothing but a shame.
The only real features that the software being refered to as 'p2p' provide beyond what is provided by standard OSs are multi-source downloads, and improved searching.
Use P2P and download Das Experiment. It's a modern German remake of the Stanford Prison experiment. Normal people can turn into monsters very easily in the right circumstances.
Get your own free personal location tracker
...shows that the majority of exchanges of 0s and 1s over the Internet are in fact illegal (throw together some P2P figures, never mind how much illegal stuff comes over irc, usenet, web, mail and otherwise).
By that reasoning we should abolish the peer-to-peer protcols of TCP and UDP too. Simple majority has never been enough reason to ban anything. The majority of cars are used for speeding (though minor). We don't outlaw cars.
In order to ban the tool, you must make a really damn good case that it will not seriously hurt the legal uses. Marihuana is banned, even though it has medical uses. Assult rifles are banned, though the firepower could be used for good. Diseases like anthrax is banned, though they could be used in medical research. Exceptions have been made to accomodate for legal uses, and it works, and thus we accept it.
Banning p2p as we know it would disrupt so many legal uses of peer-to-peer communication as we know it, and which we don't consider as such now. IM services, irc and much more can be used as a p2p network (even though it'll basicly be another protocol on top). Even bittorrent is, from what I've gathered, a spin-off from HTTP. What do you do when HTTP is used for more illegal things than not? Shut down the World Wide Web?
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Launching very soon: a similar "free to the consumer" ad-supported program as we partner with INTENT Mediaworks, and various P2Ps like eDonkey and Bearshare.
sample: http://www.offthepeer.com/Shared/stare-sosohot.wmv
Keep an eye on us, SoSoHot.com
We run a torrent tracker at LAN parties -- there are always a million and one patches, map packs, mods, etc., that need distributing, so all of us involved in organising the LAN seed a copy of each of the files on one or more of our machines. The only "single point of failure" is the machine with the .torrent files and tracker on, but the traffic for that is negligible; we can't afford to spend money on any sort of high-powered server or fancy switches (we're a not-for-profit deal) so BT is a nice way of distributing the load with little effort and no investment.
This sentence no verb.
- Overclocked Remix has thousands of video game remixes available for download. Due to the massive amount of bandwidth this takes up, redistribution via P2P is encouraged. In addition, they have bit torrents up of their remixes, with a total amount transferred of roughly five thousand gigabytes.
- Star Trek: New Voyages is a fan made continuation of TOS. With the amount of bandwidth a million episode downloads sucks up, they use and encourage P2P and Bit Torrent redistribution.
- The audio section of the Free Software Foundation's website has many speeches by RMS, Moglen, etc that can be shared via P2P as long as there is no modifications to the recordings. So far I've uploaded about 20 copies of their various speeches.
That's all that I haven't seen mentioned yet.So if all P2P is evil, does that mean MSFT will have to remove Windows File Sharing?
Turn this around, and any small office that just uses the P2P Windows File Sharing is a good counter example.
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/rel eases/
Relax!
JoloK
I don't think you would need to seed beyond the time it took to transer the item to derive benefits.
For a server that got slammed with something like a slashdotting, even just that short time sharing would take a huge load off the server.
It seems like this is a case where you could build a custom Apache module to automatically enable this feature for all content above a certain size, and in conjuction add support in Mozilla and derived programs.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I never use ftp anymore.
I use bittorrent for common stuff like recent
linux iso's. And emule for rare hard to find
iso's. For example when SUSE first came out the
ftp server was too busy, so I pulled down the
5 SUSE iso's via emule.
Saying that the legislators weren't allowed to read legislation they voted on is probably technically inaccurate. It is, however, frequently correct in that the vote occurs in a time scheduled quite close to the time at which the final version is delivered to the office of the legislator. I can't prove that they always get the bill before voting on it, and would actually be surprised if it were true. But usually even in extreme cases they technically received the bill before the vote happened. The bill may be thousands of pages long and they may get it only an hour before the vote, but technically they had a chance to read it.
One of the extreme examples is that state level copyright bill that was passed by Virginia a few years ago (I don't remember it's name. I think of it as 1b, but that's almost certainly wrong...it was heavily discussed on Slashdot at the time, and I've refused to do business with Virginia or Maryland companies ever since. Though the Maryland version had some interesting changes that make me think perhaps I'm wrong to penalize them.) Anyway the bill was over 2,000 pages long, and so far as I can tell NOBODY ever read the whole thing. EVER. Not even yet.
This was promoted by the charming folks of the RIAA and MPAA, and is one of the reasons that I feel they deserve no protection under the laws at all. If they are going to act like outlaws, they should be treated as outlaws.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
In true GNU spirit I offer you this blessing then.
:-)
"I hope you enjoy writing the software to do this."
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Laminar Research, the folks that do X-Plane, use Bit-Torrent as their preferred method for people to download updates and demos of their software.
Their downloads page:
http://www.x-plane.com/demo.html
-- I browse at +5 with stripped sigs
Our legislators pass laws without reading them, in some cases without being allowed to read them and/or discuss them, and we pass laws which average citizens are not allowed to own a copy of.
Would you care to mention any recorded case of this happening? Sorry, but I can't see legislators of one party willing to pass hidden legislation from another party, no matter what the subject. PATRIOT ACT I can kinda blame on mass hysteria and groupthink, but AFAIK that was public. And in the split political climate that developed shortly after 9/11, I can hardly see any other hidden legislation about security and foreign affairs getting through committee. Oh, wait. You said they're not discussed. Then what about committees?
If you think there are no images censored from the US, you are nuts.
That I agree with. There are plenty of censored images. There are of course classified documents (military abilities + specifications, ongoing investigations, etc.) that can be described as censored. Even my calc teacher, a retired Cold War lieutenant colonel, can't tell us half the abilities of his now-abandoned missile silo because he was never told if they were declassified yet. Half of this is censored because they don't want it to support the enemy, and half is censored as propaganda so that we don't stop supporting them.
As a side question, why exactly do you care to see these images? I'm sure they exist; I don't have the interest in seeing them. I don't even have the interest to see the released Abu Ghraib pictures...it's not my business. It's war; of course abuses happen. What did you expect, that we give people CPR after shooting them?
CCP is using BitTorrent to distribute both the complete EVE-Online client (roughly 500M) as well as the patches for Release -> Exodus, and Castor -> Exodus.
I suspect that one of these choices is incorrect. Correct.
This seems difficult and pretty much a no-win argument. It's very easy for the RIAA/MPAA to prove illegal use, but legitimate use will never be discussed. It's like saying "Go pull all the criminal records and show me all legitimate uses of firearms vs. illegal use". Obviously it's going to come up criminal behaviour.
Criminals will also naturally flock to the P2P applications that enable their activity (stealing mp3's for example), and those are the ones the enemies of Free are going to go after and use as "evidence". Completely ignoring the fair-use or legitimate sites that use P2P.
I blame the Chinese.
If it weren't for that invention of 0, none of these "tools" would ever have been developed to allow such illegal activity!
They are the root of this problem and should be held liable!
There is a lot of work going on in the podcasting world to utilise bit torrent to move content. The reason is simple, as the shows get popular, they kill their hosting accounts. See Evil Genius Chronicles for a podcaster using bit torrent distribution of his content.
Remember that this is the most free country on the face of the earth. And if you don't believe that then why are you still here? Because you are certainly free to leave.
Are building codes considered "law"? If so, there are MANY MANY codes that require one to purchase the code so you can see it. In other words, you don't know what the "law" is until you pay a private org for a copy of said "law".
I can think of lots of ASME, ANSI, and other codes that work like this.
The first studio news broadcasts in color began in the U.S. in the mid-1960s. The Soviet Union didn't have a color service until the mid-1960s, neither did the U.K., Canada, or anyone else, for that matter.
If you think that color was being stripped from video, it is probably because you have forgotten that almost no one at the height of the cold war owned a color tv set and the logistics of color production made it very expensive.
Ampex introduced the first studio color video tape recorder, vacuum tube technology, in 1965. Betacam camcorders do not arrive on the scene until 1982.
The country that loudly objected to the development of biological weapons anywhere, by anyone, until some of our congress critters got mailed samples of weaponized anthrax we had made in our biological weapons labs. Oops.
The ultimate source of the anthrax used in the attacks was traced to the The U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRID) at Ft. Detrick, Maryland. But the Ames stain appears in both relatively benign and weaponized states in the attacks and is known to have been held by over a dozen labs here and abroad. 2001 anthrax attacks
It is at least plausible that the anthrax was weaponized outside of any legitimate lab, as the attacker gained confidence in his handling of the material.
Our legislators pass laws without reading them, in some cases without being allowed to read them and/or discuss them, and we pass laws which average citizens are not allowed to own a copy of.
It is common in the American system for legislation to reach the floor late in the session and be adopted under what passes for party discipline in the U.S. A great deal of "pork" may be tacked on at the last minute. But anything significant or controversial has usually survived a through working-over in committe.
Copies of the U.S. Code can be purchased from the Government Printing Office at about $80 a volume.
$135 for the full set and supplement on CD-ROM. You can search or browse the code (as ASCII text) for free. United States Code: Main Page
The immediate impression is that everything is actually in black and white. If I try to picture the what the first world war was like, I tend to imagine it in black and white because that's how all images of it have been presented. If I think about it, I can add colour, but my initial view of it is that there was no colour.
How do you measure how "free" a country is? The alleged freedom in the US is just propaganda spread by politicians for people who have never been outside the US.
... are distributed by BitTorrent, as well as through traditional downloads. The problem of people downloading old patches after they've expired (as with World of Warcraft) does not apply. The EVE patches are incremental and applying an old patch just requires you to get the next one too. (they keep a full line available) The Bittorrent was a great help during their recent release of a major update (over 100 MB download) which tenthousands of players tried to download within a few days.
Groove Corporate File Sharing Software. Here is a Case Study that involved the navy.
lounge around on the blue couch
what I am getting at is that by making the film monochrome there was a definite effect on the thoughts about the images being seen. Simple marketing/ propaganda technique.
The makers of the NASA mars rover animations have a DVD quality copy of the full 320MB animation available on their site over BitTorrent
http://www.maasdigital.com/gallery.html
Another totally legal use.
This torrent was on suprnova as well.
Love it or leave it? Hmmm, sounds as if you're not free not to love it then.
Blender supply the Yafray rendering engine as a bittorrent.
this may be a self defeating argument, but azureus distributes its updates via p2p
"Yeah, Yeah, Yeah." - Lennon, McCartney
How about musicians who don't want to be signed up to the greedy red handed "industry" and would prefer to distribute their media under creative commons... Not a convincing argument for the RIAA, but the inevitable future...
Copyright's death is unstoppable, and trying to put an end to P2P will just push it deeper underground and help it proliferate by pushing more people onto the cause...
'plex
Rich Gentlemen Hide - The Existential Comic
I wrote a really lame Harry Potter fanfiction, but it had good illustrations and thousands of people have downloaded it from my hard drive. There is NO way I could have ever gotten that many people to look at it without P2P. Shareaza seems to have been the best software for having people find my story. At least 50 pictures and copies of the story are taken from my HDD each day, while nobody visits my poorly designed web page. Hooray for P2P for us sorry amateur writers!!! http//:hpbook6.freewebpage.org
do all of you people continue to wallow in the legal quicksand of whether a computer program has any legitimate uses at all? First, the net was designed to be P2P, not client-server, even though it works fine that way. Second, we must insure that the net stays P2P regardless of any corporate or gov't desires to dictate otherwise. Let's leave the question of legitimacy to the sholars, philosophers, and lawyers. Let that be their problem. It is up to us to make sure that anonymity and privacy are possible despite the legalities. I don't care if anyone says we don't have a right to those things. Let's just DO IT! We don't have to justify it to anybody. Make copyright law, censorship, prohibition, etc. impossible to enforce without banning and smashing every computer on the planet, and killing all the users. We should be doing what this guy is intending to do. This is the kind of spirit that we need. What we shouldn't be doing is begging the authorities to let us keep our tools just because we can show it has legitimate uses. We should be telling them that we will use our tools as we see fit , and we don't need their stinking permission. We are under no obligation to respect these kinds of laws that can be bought and sold like candy. I have this little obsession with a thing called equal protection. Any law or judgement that doesn't provide that is completely and absolutely invalid. With that in mind, How do you remotely disable or neutralize a gun without harming the operator? Electronic and most non-lethal weapons are easy to neutralize.
What?
The other legal use of the P2P usage is done by various web artists. Everything from student made films (some are really good) to AMV's and underground music. It's a good outlet for artists and writers who want to get there work out in the open without having to pay out the ass for a hosting site.
Of course there's the open source community that benifits from people using P2P to get their distro's by saving on bandwith, but that's been previously stated.
I fully agree. My BT download rates were lousy until I limited my upload rate between 10 and 20KB/s (where my maximum upload is 30KB/s) using Azureus. It seems that BitTorrent drowns itself for no good reason, which is a shame when you are unable to set your maximum upload speed (like in the generic client, which has no default upload cap AFAIK). I supposed it is difficult to specify a cap without knowing the maximum capacity of the connection, though.
While I realize that things like BitTorrent, Grokster et al may be what everyone is thinking about, in terms of legal defense bang for the buck isn't Windows XP Home edition a P2P network? How about most of TCP/IP which I believe is used to run a one or two LANs and well as the Internet.
I've tried jigdo three different times, and never had it work. The .ISOs would be created, but they failed to boot. Corrupted.
I'm glad to know from the other posters that torrents are available for Debian. I'll be serving Sarge when it goes "gold", just like I'm doing now for Knoppix.
Might as well use that DSL bandwidth for something useful!
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
The bill may be thousands of pages long and they may get it only an hour before the vote, but technically they had a chance to read it.
WTF? If you have one hour to read thousands of pages of dense legalese, then NO YOU DID NOT HAVE A CHANCE TO READ IT! Stop being so nonsensical, it only encourages the criminals.
PVFS (PVFS2, specficially), work very much like a P2P system.. offering a layer for storage. I think people forget the P2P is just a description for a protocol and not necessarily a set of specific uses of the protocol. Gee, thats like saying the web is just for porn.. oh, well.. ok .. still, you get the idea.
meh
SCOTUS didn't take this case to decide the narrow issue of whether or not there was a substantial non-infringing use for the software. They took it to decide if they will overturn Betamax and change the test. Perhaps going from the nice bright-line existence of a substantial non-infringing use to a dull and muddy balancing test of infringing uses versus non-infringing uses (made clearer only by the single data point that Kazaa fails the test)
apt-torrent update && apt-torrent upgrade && apt-torrent moo
Palm uses or at least used to use a P2P application to help bandwidth issues. When you download the Palm software from them, they used to ask if it was okay for you to join the software download program or some such nonsense.
Basically, it setup up a BitTorrent/Napster type hybrid client that uploaded the files to other people in the world.
Magic Mirror Backup is a P2P Backup system. Looks nice for smaller departments. I may look into using it at home, but 2 of the computers out of the 5 are Mac, and it's Win & Linux only. Maybe I'll learn porting to Darwin for fun.
I am, and always will be, an idiot. Karma: Coma (mostly effected by
As a college professor, and frequently refer to declassified government documents (now public domain) that were written during the Apollo space program. I have also references military manuals - technical publications on various Off The Shelf (OTS) systems. I obtain these and make them available on P2P networks. Unfortunately, I am constantly having to dodge the anti-speech RIAA / MPAA.
On a related note, I have seen several web servers I set up to share these files shut down because of words in the (govt given) names of the documents.
On another related note, back when I was in college, I was sued by the Business Software Alliance (BSA) for not paying for my operating system (GPL'ed Slackware Linux). I won, but never did collect on the judgement from my coutner suit. They still owe me.
All togeather, I spend one hour fighting the anti-speech NAZIs for every hour I spend on academic research.
Andy Allen
Andy@Andy-Allen.com
There are no legitamite uses of P2P file sharing technology.
Why would any distributor want to distribute their data with no cost to them? That would be stupid; distributors make their money by putting profits on the tail end of the distribution price itself! Therefore, unless the data has no IP value to the distributor, like silly communistic "open source" software, all file sharing would do is eliminate the possability to pad a distribution fee to make their buck.
And, duh, all open source software is communistic. It's against the capitalistic and corporate philosophy of this great conservative country!
(Hint: Today's word is sarcasm.)
http://pixelcort.com/
But only because they don't know what monochrome means