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eDonkey Tells Congress It's Throwing in the Towel
An anonymous reader writes "Sam Yagen, President of eDonkey, testified at the Judiciary committee's hearing 'Protecting Copyright and Innovation in a Post-Grokster World'. It was there he told the committee that he is throwing in the towel. 'The Grokster standard requires divining a company's intent, the decision was essentially a call to litigate. This is critical because most startup companies just don't have very much money. Whereas I could have managed to pay for a summary judgment hearing under Betamax, I simply couldn't afford the protracted litigation needed to prove my case in court under Grokster. Without that financial ability, exiting the business was our only option despite my confidence that we never induced infringement and that we would have prevailed under the Grokster standard.'"
I thought the open source and decentralized eMule was the tool of choice for the eDonkey network, with Shareaza and other tools following closely behind.
. . .that the U.S. government will bend over for the highest bidder.
"No beer until you finish your tequila!" -Leela's Dad
Welcome to the capitalist world, where justice is something that you purchase by the hour, not something that you have an inalienable right to.
It's what everyone else is doing to get away from the expense and inconvenience of doing business in the US.
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It's rather strange to load up an article which is talking about shutting down p2p with iPod nano ads all over the place. Now I don't know how to feel.
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
eDonkey is only a client application, there are plenty of independent eD2k servers out there that will continue to operate without it.
eMule also has it own kademlia network for distributed content indexing but it requires a server to fetch some clients to bootstrap off of - very much like Gnutella. If you do not mind hunting down a bootstrap IP:Port yourself and entering it manually, then you can use Kad without eD2k servers.
"No reasonable person can claim anything except that his plan to achieve popularity with eDonkey was through facilitating illegal file-sharing. "
/.ers) may not seem obvious to other reasonable people.
First, I disagree. Plenty of reasonable people could claim otherwise. What may seem obvious to you (and a lot of us other
Second, it doesn't matter if he facilitates illegal file-sharing. What matters is if he expressly promotes illegal filesharing, or takes other affirmative steps to foster infringement.
Justice Souter, from the Grokster decision:"We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties.""
Whether or not his business plans hinged on ease of infringement to gain popularity -- if he didn't promote it, and if he didn't distribute eDonkey with the expressed intent of promoting illegal filesharing, then he would not lose the case.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
"Ah, but can you prove that in court? OJ got off with more evidence against him than you have on eDonkey. "
If the file don't transmit,
You must acquit.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
They just need to move to Canada, where the Supreme Court decided that file sharing is legal. Voilà! Problem solved!
The way to make money off P2P is not to offer P2P services (a direct invitation for lawyers and other scum to line their pockets), but to *use* P2P to distribute your own data for next to nothing.
It's a terrific delivery mechanism with an enormous benefit/cost ratio, so why not make that the basis of your business by delivering your own material over it, or delivering content belonging to other less technical providers under contract? You would be legally in the clear, while benefitting from absolutely minimal networking costs.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Rich people win again!!! I like rich people because they're better than the rest of us. I think they should always get their way, because rich people are just better genetic material, it's true, ask them. The government knows it, it's just a matter of time before the rest of us catch on.
There only needs to be one corporation: MicroHaliRIMPAADellAppleMartopoly. And it will pay regular people the same wages, but rich people will get more. And it will know what we're doing at all times (to thwart terrorists) and have total control of all media. Like real communism (not ideal communism). Kind of like what's happening now, but without hiding the fact that regular people are getting shit on.
Suppose a for-profit hospital sets up a clinic in a high-crime area, despite the difficulty of operating a business there. Their business plan calls for them to make money from the crimes of their customer base. They report the evidence of crimes they find, but they can't police the neighborhood.
A pawn shop in that same neighborhood sells guns and ammo, despite the difficulty of operating a business there. Their business plan calls for them to make money from the crimes of their customer base. They report the evidence of crimes they find, but they can't police the neighborhood.
What do both of those businesses have in common? They both make crime more convenient. One sells the supplies, the other wipes up the mess (so you are less likely to die if your victim fights back). Both businesses serve the perps and the victims, and both discriminate as best they can between them.
What do they have in common with EDonkey? Either they all need to be shut down for capitalizing on human frailty, or none of them do.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
This: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_Victory
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Things do not break laws. Corporations do not even break laws. Only people can. We have some errors in our legal system right now that hold things responsible for lawbreaking that cannot break laws. Corporations aren't things. They are federally-sanctioned legal entities that exist as legal fact on paper and in practical fact by a massive collective agreement that it is what we say it is. Corporations can't break laws any more than knitting circles can. But we allow people who break laws to hide behind them. Bad juju.
And it's the same with file sharing. A computer network cannot violate a law. Nor can a network card, a hard disk, a mouse button, or anything else beyond the two people complicit in copyright infringement.
Copyright infringement is like global warming. People are so goddamed polarized on the subject that having an honest intellectual debate is impossible. You've got the P2P advocates who all claim in unison they primarily use P2P for legitimate purposes when the majority of people who really that software are violating copyright. This is because the majority of users are not Slashdotters innocently swapping Linux distributions, they're high school and college kids with little disposable income and an insatiatble thirst for new music, missed TV shows, and movies they can't afford to go see.
Then you've got the content cartels confusing us (on purpose) with flat out lies and mischaracterizations. Copyright infringement is not theft. There's another term that covers theft, and it's called... well... theft. Copyright infringement is a violation of somebody else's exclusive right to manage a particular piece of intellectual property in the manner they prefer, with some common sense exceptions called "Fair Use" that are defined on a case-by-case basis. And downloading songs isn't even a criminal offense unless you do a lot of it. No more than shoplifting a candy bar is.
We need to stop blaming tools for the actions of people. It's not the drug's fault that you're stoned. It's that you decided to consume it. It's not the gun's fault that you murdered somebody. You decided to shoot it. This hellbent determination to excuse the actions of individuals by blaming their bad decision making on tools or circumstances has got to end at some point, or our tangled web of indulging and empathetic laws will result in a soup of legal abstractness that makes it impossible for anybody to ever do anything wrong. It will always go back to being the fault of some company that manufactured some product or tool that enabled a person to commit a crime, and since the corporation as a peopleless legal entity will be held responsible, we end up with a legal system in which individual people are never responsible for anything. That's going to suck.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
No, my friend. That would be workers.
Capitalism's Big Lie is that it is responsible for production. Once upon a time, this was true: capitalism freed productive forces from the grave inefficiencies and baseless impediments of the feudal system. But now it merely does a better and better job of siphoning profits to those who own, and contributes no productivity. It serves the interests of the parasites.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
It's interesting that so many folks would bring up the issue of accountability, really. As with any crime committed with the aid of an instrument or piece of technology of some kind, the instrument itself can not be held accountable for the act it was used to perpetrate. Common sense tells us this. If only common sense were applicable to the Judicial Branch of the United States government, perhaps we would see a sharp decline in incidents such as this.
If I remember correctly, the Supreme Court recently ruled that a gun manufacturer - Smith & Wesson, to be exact - can not be held accountable if their products are used to injure or kill innocent people. When I read of this, I thought to myself, "Finally, common sense prevails!" Did I think that because I want to defend gun manufacturers? No; I've never liked guns, and I've never liked the people who make them, either. I became fond of that ruling because it embodies an important underlying concept: A device, even if it is designed for the sole purpose of causing serious and immediate bodily harm, can not be inherently evil. Therefore, the person producing these devices can't be made to answer for someone else's crimes.
Sure, if a company was producing a dangerous product that didn't have any real legitimate applications whatsoever, they could - and probably should - be dealt with. However, the point remains: Here we have a gun manufacturer, whose products may well kill hundreds every year here in the United States alone, but it's not their fault that people are using their guns to commit serious crimes. It is the motive of the buyer and how the product is actually used that truly matters, not the product itself and the person who made it available. (After all, firearms have other places in our lives. Home defense, hunting, sport, or simply collecting guns, for example.)
You can probably see why I almost shit myself when I first heard about the Grokster ruling. The Grokster ruling is, in itself, a shining example of the ass-backwards logic that exists in the courts these days. A gun manufacturer can't be held accountable if their guns kill someone, but it's Grokster's fault if I pirate a poorly compressed copy of The Boondock Saints using their product. Excuse me? Of course, it also goes to show where the government's priorities really are: satisfying campaign contributors and special interest groups. I know I'm really going off on a tangent here, but if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. The NRA doesn't think gun manufacturers should be held accountable if their guns kill people, but the RIAA and MPAA think it's Grokster's fault if someone uses their products to pirate music and movies. Let's play a nice, fun game of 'Follow the Money', shall we? Wait. We don't have to. It's blatantly obvious.
It's extremely unfortunate that any company can be made to buckle under this kind of pressure. Many new technologies are now endangered by the Grokster ruling, not because they can be eliminated outright, but because it takes so much time, money, and patience to deal with the courts that nobody in their right mind without a few million dollars and an army of lawyers would even try to defend their products.
I just find it very strange that the Smith & Wesson ruling's logic doesn't apply elsewhere. Sure, if a product is defective, and that defect results in bodily harm or the destruction of property, that's the manufacturer's fault. However, if a product does not cause bodily harm or the destruction of property by its own volition, and must first be activated or otherwise utilized by a human being to present any kind of danger, it's the user's fault.
Therefore, the proprietors of a filesharing network and the programmers who created the client software used to access said network can not be held accountable if other people utilize their network to engage in illegal activity. While I do believe that the network's owners should do what th