Michael Weiss Interview

chrish writes "Zeropaid has an interview with Michael Weiss, CEO of StreamCast Networks, maker of Morpheus. Michael has been involved in MGM v Grokster since the beginning, and provides a clear, thorough timeline of events since then. He also details interesting insights of his own into the future of the p2p space, including some new ad models."

Comments

Following the case

[Polycom Sucks]

" The Supreme Court agreed and heard the case on March 29, 2005. We expect to hear their decision in late June 2005."

For any of you who are following the case, it looks like we may hear the landmark decision in just over two months. A decision for Grokster is what most of us are hoping for. It would be the modern day equivalant of the Betamax case of the late 70s.

Re:Following the case

[Polycom Sucks]

You are correct. I was thinking only of the decision in the U.S. District Court.

The U.S. District Court ruled in favor of Sony in October 1979. Next, the U.S. Court of Appeals reversed the decision in October 1981. Finally, the Supreme Court reversed the appeals court decision on January 17, 1984.

(Source)

At least P2P is still kicking....

[JoeMerchant]

It has been a long time since Napster took a dirt nap at the hands of the establishment.

There's more than the "we don't run a central server" defense keeping P2P alive, I think the courts actually see the legitimate side like home video recording, which "we all knew" was only for porn and pirating....

I tried, and failed, to interest some Angel V/C groups in starting a P2P venture just around the time that Gnutella was surfacing (and the .com bubble hadn't quite burst yet.) They had a hard time getting their heads around the legit moneymaking side of it all and passed on the deal - and apparently making legitimate money is still the hard nut to crack. Showing ads to pirates isn't very lucrative, or particularly safe from lawsuits.

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Wealth, Fame, Strength and Intelligence await in iCLOD city.

Re:Ad models are the problem.

[mtpruitt]

Yes, this is a nice observation about the usage patterns of different clients and technologies.

No, this doesn't really matter for legal standards.

The plaintiffs in this suit are looking for secondary liability for copyright infringement under either of two theories: either the software companies helped someone else infringe (contributory) or they were responsible for the actions of the direct infringers (vicarious). The fact that the software companies received money from advertisements / adware / spyware / whatever is only relevant for the latter theory, vicarious infringement. For contributory infringement, it plays no direct role, although it can be consider among other things.

What this means is that software producers that don't gain financially from their product (i.e., FOSS) still could be liable if Grokster et al lose their case. The big fear is that any decision by the Court could be interpretted in a vague manner to chill other seemingly appropriate activities.

(There is also some talk about using an inducement standard, but that hasn't been shown yet. That would address the issue of benefit from ads directly a little bit more, but still could snare FOSS.)

Ads don't kill technology -- (overactive) copyright does.

Re:whoo-ee!

[fcrick]

You obviously haven't tried Morpheus recently. Morpheus' Gnutella implementation is up to date, but Morpheus hardly relies on Gnutella at the moment. Right now, most search results come from NEOnet, their in-house DHT (Distributed Hash Table), which provides fast, complete searches of all Morpheus clients.

Morpheus has one bundle, SolidPeer, which can be completely removed after install in Add/Remove Programs.

Note: I work for an affiliate of Streamcast.