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LimeWire to Block Copyrighted Work
An anonymous reader writes "Slyck is reporting that LimeWire is working on new code that will block non-licensed material. The new code checks to see if shared material is licensed, if it is not, the LimeWire client will politely inform the user, 'LimeWire can't determine if one or more files have been published under a suitable license. These files will not be shared.'" From the article: "Approximately 3 to 5 days ago, LimeWire developers began working on two new branches, cc_reverify_interval-branch and cc-publish-branch. The code in the first branch works to verify that every file shared has a license. If this is not the case, the file will not be shared. The second branch is for publishing one's own work without a license. According to the release notes, individuals can attach a Collective Commons license if the work is either their own or have permission to distribute the work ... According to a LimeWire beta tester who informed Slyck of this news, this feature is already complete. Developers are simply waiting for the signal to integrate these branches with the main branch, providing Mark Gorton, CEO of LimeWire, decides to go through with this."
Well, what other P2P programs are there? This one is dead.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
This seems like an effort in futility. With all the networks out there and only Limewire doing this people will just switch products. And if all the commerical networks start doing this then an OSS alternative will just take it's place. Check out http://gift.sourceforge.net/
The legal repercussions of Limewire giving up the fight for open p2p and enforcing explicit licence checks on files are what's most important here, the fact that the supreme court have muddied the waters enough to start working against p2p developers again. The fact that Limewire itself has these blocks in place is more of a liability reduction move than anything else, as due to Limewire's open source nature an anonymous coder or two can go through and make non-official versions of the program that do not honor these checks. Obviously Limewire themselves cannot be held accountable for versions of the code produced by unrelated users, and the arms race begins for them to track the creators of modified versions.
Business Voyeur
...they are protecting themselves. Fair enough. What remains to be seen is if LimeWire will provide the RIAA (or other thugs) with personal information of the people sharing files (if they even have that, I'm not familiar with their architecture).
Per default you are not allowed to distribute any copyrighted work.
So what if I created the song myself? No wait, I still can't distribute it because I've presumably accidentally copied it from a song on the radio.
LimeWire is open source, it'll fork...
Every time they release a new version of LimeWire there is a "cracked" pro version within days. Why? Because you don't even need to "crack" it, it's open source, you can just d/l the source and remove the "features" you don't want.
Consider the impact this can have on the indie artists... and those artists who try to have their music publically available (quite a few do exist) - how are they supposed to get a license so that the music can be shared? What standard does LimeWire plan to use in order to implement the license use?
Isn't Limewire just a GNUtella client? Just use GNUcleus instead.
Morphing Software
Where to folks?
Is there something like that for the mac?
"Hello 911? I just tried to toast some bread, and the toaster grew an arm and stabbed me in the face!"
I'm afraid that you never had the freedom to trade copyrighted materials.
What freedoms exactly are you losing? The only reason this will effect you is if you were using Limewire to download illegal materials. But then Slashdot says that P2P is used for legal trading, so what's the problem?
This is nothing to do with the goverment, it's a private business doing something with their own software. Please put the tin-foil hats away.
And besides, it's not going to stop other people from moving to Bearshare, or WinMX, or Shareaza, or Gnucleus, or even Bittorrent or USENET.
Nor will it stop anybody create a fork of Limewire with the copy protection stuff removed.
Pre-canned Evolution Links for all those Slashdot holy wars.
No. It will affect anyone who downloads perfectly legal material for which Limewire cannot find a valid license for. It now moves the state of legality in file-trading towards "guilty until proven innocent". If this becomes the norm, there will be a de facto requirement that all files come with some sort of license attached. In other words, it is a literal case of the "authorities" stating "Papers please" to allow you to pass, just applied to files instead of people.
Ironically, information is one of few things that are essentially impossible to keep from being free (as in freedom), and yet people keep trying.
Read carefully. Limewire users will still be able to download anything they want off the Gnutella network. However, Limewire will not SHARE copyrighted files, transforming it as the uber-leech client. Use Limewire to download copyrighted files, but never share them back. This protects the user and makes him safer from prosection, hence encouraging him to pay for the Limewire Pro registration.
Now, this will work because Gnutella is an open network, with many clients. A commercial leech client like the new Limewire will drain some ressources off the network, and in time, other clients may adapt to detect the newer Limewire versions, at which point Limewire will fight back...
But remember: Limewire may well be evil.
Hypothetical 1: A child draws a picture of Nemo. Its pretty good and their parents are so proud that they scan it and distribute it to all their friends and family, and put it on a public site so that anyone can look at it, if they choose. Is that copyright infringement? I would have thought it would have been concidered a derivative work - as it was an original work inspired by a copyrighted object.
/. reader is messing about in Lisp and creates an AI that can interpret a conventional image and then reproduce a derivative work that looks similar. The /. reader is so proud, that he places a few of these images on /. Is that a copyright infringement?
/. readers code was GPL, a few uber geeks get together and modify the code so that it creates near perfect derivative works. If you look closley you can see that the image is nothing like the original, but within human contraints it would be concidered almost the same. They quickly realise that this method creates files substancially smaller than the original, and even though they are not copies, those who didn't study compression technologies wouldn't really be inclined to notice a difference. The files are clearly marked as genereated by this program and distributed for free. Nobody is claiming that they are copies, they arn't they are inspired works of art and distributed under the creative commons licence. Is that copyright infringement?
/. post so its not exactly a well positioned argument, but I think it shows a clear progression and abuse of the copyright law. I'm not convinced that the use of a lossy compression algorithm on copyrighted works could be concidered anything other than a synopsis of that work - if that. If you compared an MPEG2 to a DivX and H.264 created from that stream would even a single line of the source code be the same? And does the derived file have any value without an interpretor?
Hypothetical 2: A
Hypothetical 3: As the
Hypothetical 4: Joe Cracker rips a DVD, removes the CSS and Macrovision and decides to create a private members website that charges $10 a year to access on an all you can eat download basis. Other that removing the encryption no work is done the file and it is essentially the same as it was when it was sold on Amazon. Now thats got to copyright infringement, right?
This is a
I'd be interested to here what you think.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!