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Spanish Court Rules In Favor of P2P Engineer
Sir Mal Fet writes "In line with previous rulings discussed here, a judge in Spain has ruled that P2P technologies are 'completely neutral' (original in Spanish ; Google translation ), thus dismissing a lawsuit originated in 2008 from the Spanish Association of Musical Producers (Promusicae), Warner, EMI, and Sony suing Pablo Soto, a Spanish man who created the Blubster, MP2P y Piolet programs to share files. The labels demanded 13 million euros in damages arguing that the mere existence and distribution of P2P technologies violated copyright, but the ruling stated the technology itself was neutral, so the creator could not be held responsible for how the software was used, and demanded that they pay for legal expenses. Promusicae said it was going to appeal the ruling."
because a deranged criminal killed a pedestrian with a stolen car. Wow the judge did his job no story here. Unless the story is about judges doing their jobs, in which case we have a winner.
Well, there's a thought! You mean it has the same neutrality as a car, a knife, a gun? Sorry, where have I been all this time - I've been lead to believe that technology is somehow evil because it "may" be used for illegal activities.
The Spanish press ( http://www.elpais.com/articulo/tecnologia/Pablo/Soto/industria/discografica/siempre/va/paso/detras/elpeputec/20111221elpeputec_3/Tes )also says this guy might be suing them back, because in the course of the lawsuit against him, these cartels applied some really dirty tactics against him (like hiring goons to follow him every day, etc.)
I only ever use P2P to download FOSS and, windows fixes. There are plenty of music streams if I want to listen to something. I suspect that Comcast is stepping on the streams though at the behest of XXAA or some other equally praiseworthy organization. These guys rip off artists and slander titles out of principle. So I hope someone is sticking it to them for a change.
Beats me. What difference is there between being "unlimited in length of term" and merely practically so because the length is constantly being enlarged at a rate which is faster or equal to the progression of time?
SCOTUS thought there was some kind of difference. Unfortunately...
Your argument is based on the premise that there are no guns. There is a substantial difference between 'there are no guns' and 'guns are banned.' Attempts at prohibition often forget this difference (and most of the remainder is just a desire to keep certain behaviors out of sight regardless of the social ills this causes).
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
"Technology", in the sense of basic principles, is certainly neutral. However, specific assemblages of technology - from a car, to a gun, to a spoon, or a computer program, certainly aren't neutral. they have good points and bad points, which are determined by their intended or designed use, their practical or common use, and their potential or possible use. How we allow for the use of given assemblies of technologies depends entirely on how we view the social cost-benefit equation of the assembled tool.
Many people want to ban certain tools based on their potential usage, which is either irrational or irresponsible (or displays a hidden agenda unrelated to the merits of the tool).
However, it is equally dishonest to judge a tool merely on its proclaimed intended usage.
As a society, we must look at the whole picture, and hopefully, error on the side of permissiveness. That does not mean that we should be shy about outlawing things whose negative potential and common usage significantly outweigh any benefit that is intended or common usage provides. Like everything else, it's a balancing act.
In this case, the judge did just that, much to the *IAA (or Spanish equivalent's) disappointment.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
P2P helps people break the law in the very same way as FTP ad HTTP do. If you want to find real-world examples of P2P usage for legal purposes, just try to download some popular operating system image or a MMORPG installer, you'll probably find that they are also offered as P2P downloads because it results in less strain for the content owner's servers and potentially faster downloads for the content consumer.
How about videos of cats doing funny things? Or dogs? or kids? Or art? Political speech? Open source software? There are plenty of examples of what people could legally publish. The big media cartels aren't the only ones who can produce content.
...then anyone who uses P2P in any of its forms is automatically violating copyright? We're talking anything from a crossover cable between two computers to a university compute cluster to the INTERNET here, folks - the labels, to put it bluntly, are fucking delusional.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
I'm sure Field and Stream would agree link
I've used handguns for hunting many times. It can be a far more difficult challenge than hitting your target from 400 meters with a .308 or other rifle.
You could also list them as a deterrent to criminal activities
Most states have very strict laws about the carrying of a concealed weapon. This is why your standard weapons permit only allows you to own the weapon and a CCW (Carry Concealed Weapon) permit does. CCW's are highly regulated to such an extent that most average people with no criminal history can and will be denied them.
Actually, it's not illegal in Spain to share copyrighted files. So whatever his intended purpose was, the main use the tools came to were not illegal in Spain.
In particular, what files did he think people might legally share with the software that couldn't have been obtained elsewhere?
What does it matter?
Are you seriously arguing that just because there is another legal way to obtain something, one can not create an alternative?
So because I can buy something at Wall-Mart we don't need any other shops/malls?
Both FTP and HTTP have ton's legal uses and only a tiny fraction of illegal uses, with most P2P stuff it's exactly the reverse, they are optimized for illegal sharing and quite useless for legal sharing.
Hm...interesting...most P2P stuff is optimized for illegal sharing...thus explaining why Skype is optimized for legal VoIP calls. Somehow I get the feeling there are more Skype users out there than there are people using P2P filesharing systems to violate copyrights.
So in essence, if the goal of P2P was to make it easier for users to share legal stuff, it does an incredible shitty job at it.
The Internet itself was originally designed as a P2P system. If you are wondering what a network that is not P2P looks like, take a look at digital cable TV or some other thin client network. The whole point of the Internet is that any computer connected to the Internet can establish communication with any other computer, without having to route that communication through some single central system (note that in the case of cable TV, nodes cannot communicate with each other at all, except for communication between the head ends and the set-top box). P2P distributed computing embodies the very philosophy of the Internet, which is to share computing resources among Internet users -- whether that is storage (in the case of filesharing systems) or CPU time (in the case of Skype and grid computing efforts).
The fact that people ignore copyright laws and share copyrighted videos over P2P systems has nothing to do with P2P, and everything to do with the general public's attitudes about copyrights.
Palm trees and 8