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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."
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.
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.
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
True enough, I wasn't trying to disqualify the parent's suggestion simply because it didn't work out. But let's be rational:
Say a politician wants to ban cars because they can be used to cause so much death and destruction. Someone wants a list of safe, legal applications for cars. Well, there's driving to work, driving to school, fetching groceries, etc.
Considering the abundance and usefulness of all the successful and purpose-built functionality cars have, would makes they make a damned fine counterweight for turning a cherry picker into a trebuchet really carry much weight? Probably not, and neither should the failure of Blizzard's awful BitTorrent implimentation.
Sure, it can be used that way, but it's not particularly well-suited to it, and it sort of caught me off guard that considering what (legal) uses P2P technologies do use, one of the lamest implimentations yet was the first to be mentioned.