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Spanish Court Rules In Favor of P2P Engineer

Posted by samzenpus on from the no-fine-for-you dept.

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."

7 of 365 comments (clear)

  1. That is like suing Ford by slackware+3.6 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:That is like suing Ford by not_surt · · Score: 5, Funny

      The name BitTorrent is obviously a thinly-veiled allusion to piracy.
      Pirate steal pieces of eight. *Bit*s come eight to a pack.
      Water forms *Torrent*s. The sea is made of water. Pirates sail the seven seas.
      And so: BitTorrent.
      That judge must be blind (or bought off by Big Piracy) not to see that BitTorrent exists solely for piratical purposes.

    2. Re:That is like suing Ford by CoderFool · · Score: 5, Insightful

      People with or without guns kill people

    3. Re:That is like suing Ford by AJH16 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Actually, bullets have higher latency, though I am now wondering what the bandwidth of a bullet would be if you made it with microSD cards. Perhaps we can have a new wireless internet spec based on the cell carriers shooting their customers. Doesn't seem to far off from the current model.

      --
      AJ Henderson
    4. Re:That is like suing Ford by mcgrew · · Score: 5, Insightful

      America's poor are fat precicsely because of bad welfare. Healthy food is expensive. Fattening food is cheap. Pasta, potatos ($2 for a huge bag), macaroni and cheese... no matter what the food, if it's good for you it's expensive, bad for you if it's cheap.

      You try eating on $40 a month; that's how much a person on SSI disability gets in food stamps, and she only gets $600 in cash.

      But you go ahead living in your fantasy world where the only people without jobs are lazy and nobody ever goes hungry here.

      --
      Free Martian Whores!
  2. He also might be suing them back... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.)

  3. Re:He wrote it to share files... by peppepz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.