RIAA Says P2P Encourages Illegal Downloads

stlhawkeye writes "The RIAA is at it again, attacking inconvenient technology because it can be abused. They have sent another round of letters to P2P services, asking them to stop "encouraging users" to illegally distribute copyrighted material. eDonkey, LimeWire, and Kazaa are all on the RIAA's hit list, along with 2Hub, BitTorrent, WinMX and Free Peers, maker of file-swapping software BearShare. One wonders how they intend to attack BitTorrent, which can be and is used in legitimate mass distribution efforts of legal material, such as World of Warcraft patches. Are FTP and /usr/sbin/scp next?"

Comments

Submitter is on crack...

[Zamboni]

The article points out:

1. "Other companies in the peer-to-peer file-swapping market include i2Hub, BitTorrent, WinMX and Free Peers, maker of file-swapping software BearShare."

2. "BearShare, WinMX and LimeWire were identified in a Wall Street Journal story as recipients of the letters."

How does this equate to threatening BitTorrent, exactly? They're threatening companies with similar models to that of Grokster. Get a grip.

Grokster Doctrine

[Doc Ruby]

The context for this latest RIAA PR crusade is the Supreme Court "Grokster" decision this past Spring. The Court found that, of the P2P SW publishers which were sued, the ones which could be liable for illegal abuse of their SW by users were those publishers which "encouraged" the abuse. The Court found that Kazaa was liable, because its internal memos showed that they were expecting such abuse, and it designed external promotions consistent with that detected strategy. The other publishers, including Grokster, were not found liable, lacking that evidence of promotion.

Whether the Court was correct in finding such encouragement by Kazaa is now merely post-game quibbling. So also are arguments about whether a person can be held liable for another person jumping off a bridge just because the person told them to. The Court has ruled. So the RIAA is now portraying any P2P operator as encouraging or promoting abuse, because that's the basis for attacking them under what will now be known as the "Grokster doctrine". Any publisher, developer, designer, or user of P2P SW (or anyone else associated with it) must now invest in producing evidence that they do not promote illegal abuse. How to produce evidence of something not happening is extremely expensive and ultimately impossible.

So, as usual, only the lawyers have won, and the RIAA can do whatever it wants under these deeply flawed legal doctrines. People who just want to use the content we own, fairly, have to look elsewhere for some way to protect our rights.