Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
bt.etree.org for distributing legally traded music via torrents? Along with various other P2P protocols for doing the same thing (FurthurNET, etc).
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)
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
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.)
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.
The BBC is apparently considering using P2P for the distribution of their archives once it goes live.
We Build Beautiful Websites
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
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.
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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 ----
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.
RIAA is not filing legal charges against bittorrent as a program. Perhaps they would like to shut down the sourceforge site, but it is much easier for them to attack the torrent providers.One of the qualities of bittorrent is that it is fairly visible whether a torrent provider links illegal stuff, and therefore it is easy for RIAA to track down the right people.
This is good news for the open source community, because in a year or two there will be no more sites like supernova.org, because the RIAA have sued the illegal trorrent providers into hell, and the open source community will still be able to use bittorrent to provide download of open source software. Of course the closing down of illegal bittorrent sites will not be the end of P2P, but it will render todays story meaningless. Whats the point listing up legal use of P2P, when bittorrent provides a transparent effective technology?
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