So it is your stance that he should be held accountable for something he joked about 5 or so years ago?
No. However, it is not even remotely clear it was joking. Examinating the Internet Archive shows that the comment about this being a "parody" was added within the last 8 months; it may well have been added since the verdict. While the "musings" section it was under before it was unlinked from the front of his homepage (in roughtly the middle of 2003) is hardly on par with his "serious writings", the other musings are not exactly lists of lightbulb jokes or StarTrek slashfic, but rather more abstract pieces of still reasonably serious thought.
Furthermore, the time between statement and action is far shorter than you pretend. Bit torrent was first released in 2001; Bram is claiming that this screed was first released in 1999. However, after checking Google (as the blogosphere rapidly pollutes), Google's Usenet archive, and the Wayback Machine, I see no independent evidence of publication prior to Bittorrent coming on the scene circa 2001.
Also are the writers at Wired psychic? Did they look into his head and know what his "intent" was?
He stated flat out that he "built systems to [...] commit digital piracy" himself. Whether his intent with the article was parody or whether it was an honest assessment of his purposes would be a question of fact, which ergo must be determined by a jury. It would also be worth noting that his other conduct has been consistent with this manefesto; EG, "I release my code and writings freely, and publish all of my ideas early to make them unpatentable."
Intent is extreemly difficult to prove without a trail of acts all leading in the same direction. One statement does not a trail make.
Oh, agreed. But "the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step".
This isn't fatal, but it's bad. There may be further evidence; I haven't been able to find any archive of the early BitTorrent developement mailing lists, but I'm not being paid $35 an hour as a paralegal researcher to do so.
Even if he intended the software for illegal use, that doesn't make the act of writing or even distributing it illegal.
No; promoting it for such use does.
Held: 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, going beyond mere distribution with knowledge of third-party action, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties using the device, regardless of the device's lawful uses.MGM v. Grokster.
Now, whether this constitutes evidence of promotion is a question that must be left to a jury. It does, however, seem a useful piece for the building of a case... although I am neither a Lawyer nor Judge to be certain.
A copyright violation did not occur until the first person transfered the first piece of copyrighted data. Then that person is PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE for the act.
True, and nothing will diminish that individual's personal responsibilty. However, this does not make Brad (arguably) ethically or (more important) legally immune from responsibility for his actions that led to this act. The concept of "accessory before the fact" exists in law and ethics alike; in which if these two disciplines are you arguing? (For details on the concept of contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, I suggest you refer to the milestone Fonovisa v. Cherry Auction case, along with the above cited MGM v. Grokster.)
Based on what you have written, if a person says, "I want to rob a bank." and they even post a few sec
Please don't compare guns with a software technology that has so many legal and practical applications - and kills no one.
Hey, I didn't start the comparison. And read more carefully-- the question is not whether P2P and guns should be legal, but whether someone who makes them should be liable for their unlawful use. In each case, if the intent of manufacture can be shown to be the unlawful use, then the manufacturer should share in the liability.
As far as I am concerned, both should remain legal. Fortunately, the current court ruling leaves P2P legal-- it merely declared open season on a couple of manufacturers bent on profiting primarily from those who commit piracy.
Excuse me? The item wired is indicating from his website implies that the intentions may have been illegal-- or more precisely, to encourage illegal acts, which in turn in this specific instance (copyright violation) is illegal. While the statutory basis of the concept of contributory copyright infringement in the Sony case might have been weak (the law is only explicit for patents), if the legislature disagreed they have had several decades to change the law and clarify their intentions if they wished to expressly only allow direct infringement. Despite a major revision of copyright law in the 1980's and the revisiting of such issues with the DMCA, they have not done this.
As such, your analogy has run into the iceberg of a cold and contradictory fact, and behaves much like any vessel in such conditions.
What, aren't we allowed to state our opinions anymore without having the fear of being haunted by the past?
True; but when you state your opinions, you must realize the extent to which they will illuminate your future actions, and remember illumination when you take those actions, even in the case of civil disobedience.
Legally speaking, Cohen is as guilty as a gun manufacturer. He simply provided the way to others commit a crime.
Alas, this is not the case. Gun manufacturers do not advocate using guns to commit crimes; thus, they escape liability for the illegal actions of those who commit crimes with the aid of their products. Cohen may not be so well protected, and given this statement may be considered liable for contributory infringement.
Even in the eyes of the Grokster case, there is no mention that BitTorrent had piracy in mind.
Umm... what about that part where he says: "I build systems to disseminate information, commit digital piracy..." (emphasis added).
This could be taken as prima facia evidence that part of his motivation in creating BitTorrent was and intent to induce people to commit piracy, and thus making him liable for contributory infringement. Not good.
Assuming Cohen actually ascribed to this parody of the "'prototypical' cypherpunk manifesto", it sounds like bittorrent would be an expression of free speech and a form of political protest to me.
Unfortunately, if you look at the Internet Archive of the website, and make your way though the various broken links to find the different vesions of the agenda, you'll see that this "parody" is not labeled as such until recently.... more recently than the archive shows, in fact. Perhaps changed after the ruling came down? Furthermore, it has been delinked from his current home page, although it used to reside under "Musings."
This leaves judging the intent problematic. While the other "musings" are not so serious as the "serious writings", they're not complete fluff either. This isn't going to be a laughing matter if it goes to court.
What becomes more important for the BitTorrent project is the extent to which Brad's demonstrated intentions may be taken as evidence for the intentions of other developers who worked with him on the project,
apointwhichIwasdiscussing in the followup to the case with someone.
Game theory is the branch of economics devoted to agent behavior and best-course actions (minmax trees, ply trees, risk minimization, saddlepoint grids, quanta, that sort of stuff.)
Game theory may be more accurately described as a branch of mathematics, which has applications in many areas, including economics... and military theory.
Of all of the ones you point out, this is the only one I would argue that the allocation might be deserved. Ham Radio is bloody useful under emergency conditions, and it's operators should be encouraged even outside emergencies.
I was going to suggest you replace the Church of the Subgenius link with a Church of Scientolgy link
No. I believe the current "Church" of Scientology not to be a church, but rather an unindicted criminal conspiracy. The courts -- and Scientology's legal team -- disagree. =|
Some of the membership are doubtless true believers, and no more deluded than any other religion. Clambakes aside, the faith isn't any wackier than the "Jedi". However, speaking as someone raised Catholic, I would say the members of the current church leadership are in serious need of their own version of Martin Luther and 95 Theses nailed to their church doors.
It also might help if we could persuade our congresscritters that 18 USC 1839 part 3 should be modified to specifically exclude "religious scriptures" from eligibility for legal protection as trade secrets, thus pulling one of their more unwholesome legal fangs.
Cable is included as a "feature" with my apartment's rent. I don't mind, since it's still the cheapest solo apartment within walking distance of my job. (Leaving aside the complex next door which has a three year wait list and crappier furnishings....) However, as much as I enjoy CNN, I do like being able to flip on the local news when the local weather's regular summer storms take out the incompetent local cable branch. And I really do NOT want to invest money in a new TV for the analog/digital switch over.
This raises a question, though. Suppose (ala RedHat) SlimeCo has a product that is functionally identical to their P2P app, but is open sourced and freely available. If it was distributed under a liberal license (say, a BSD-style license), would other developers be liable for contributory infringement-type suits if they develop a derivative that's 99% slimeco code? Sure, re-developing might not be difficult, but in the meantime, would they be in any trouble? Are their hands automatically unclean because they worked to develop the code itself with slimeco? If so, does that mean that any work they did has to be abandoned and begun anew?
That's a case where you ought to ask a real lawyer-- and I'm not even a law student!
Speculating, I would guess that since the activities of SlimeCo are only evidence of SlimeCo's (criminal) intent, other folks who worked to develop the product would not be automatically at fault. However, it might (depending on the judge and lawyers involved) be admissible to some degree as supporting evidence of other parties' criminal intent-- EG, SlimeCo's intent was criminal, what makes you guys any different?
Furthermore, assuming that SlimeCo was the prime mover in such development, and doing so with the obvious purpose of (induced) massive copyright infringement, it is presumable that as with any other design process, the intention of the designers would be at least partially evident in the design. You might be able to avoid the legal hassle, especially if there was clear evidence elsewhere (EG: discussion on the development mailing list) showing that efforts were being made to try to prevent such infringement. The development team would want to have someone talk to the nice people at the EFF to find a lawyer (theirs or another) to advise them, if they don't have a handy lawyer already.
Can they (legally) sell the software to someone with clean hands so that other person can distribute it while not promoting its use to infringe copyright?
Ah, but you're forgetting the other of our two preconditions: distribution. Once company SlimeCo has demonstrated criminal intent, they are no longer able to distribute the product-- and that would include transfer of ownership to CleverCo. Participating in such a transfer attempt would be remarkably foolish for CleverCo, since they would risk being tainted with unclean hands, thereby knocking them out of the market and into a nasty liability. SlimeCo's product is an albatross around their neck.
Of course, as I noted, CleverCo can reinvent a product that does similar decentralized distribution: EG, BitTorrent. And as long as CleverCo makes sure to keep their hands clean and hire the legal team of Clever, Cleverer, and Vicious (with the ACLU and EFF filing amicus curia), then the ??AA's legal team of Dewey, Chatham, Fisher, and Howe is back to square minus one in their legal proceedings.
If they can legally do that, then I will admit that you thought this out better than I did and I'll cease being annoyed by the decision.
You can be annoyed if you want to keep being able to download MP3's of the pop charts without paying; however, if you're a fan of Indie music and various other media that use P2P with owners consent, you can be (mostly) relieved that P2P won't be killed outright.
The main worry in the ruling is that the court hinted that efforts should be made by P2P app makers to at least try to design to be able to prevent piracy. This is a non-trivial problem, and may effectively mandate nasty forms of DRM. But I can see several trivial modifications to BitTorrent can be made to at least indicate reasonable effort towards that, so my worries revert back to the general problem of court turnover under a Bush presidency. Given the current administration, you should worry more about new appointments allowing the re-examination of West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish than MGM v. Grokster.
Exactly, so stop the company from promoting it's use to infringe copyright, not from distributing the software!
I'm not missing the nuance, I'm coming at the statement from the other direction, mainly because it helps shed light on oddities like this sometimes.
Yes, but no.
The promotion is not the illegal part. It is the intent behind the promotion that is unlawful. The promotion is merely evidence of criminal intent. This is the key nuance it seems you fail to have grasped.
If you start at the other end of the statement, you'll first note that "you can't promote copyright infringement" (paraphrased, of course). There are two possible courses of action because there are two conditions that together cause the software to run afoul of the law. The first course assumes that the second condition will not be corrected, which is not necessarily the case.
Again, no; your paraphrasing is the problem. In fact, while I'd want to ask a lawyer (IANAL) and would not care to try the experiment, if someone were massively promoting copyright violation without doing so themself or distributing tools to aid doing so, a case might be made to consider this protected as free speech. (Consider "Steal This Book" and recent knock offs.)
The two preconditions are not "distribution" and "criminal promotion", but "distribution" and "criminal intent". I repeat: the promotion is only evidence of the intent. Internal e-mails saying "yay! aiding piracy is going to make us rich!" (which also exist in this case because these companies are run by morons) would serve equally well (once discovery finished), even with no external promotional campaign. And once you have demonstrated this criminal intent, the doctrine of unclean hands means "you can't distribute this kind of software," since that evidence forever more shows the pre-existing criminal intent.
Of course, this does not mean someone else who doesn't have "unclean hands" from involvement in the current screwup cannot say, "hey, P2P is cool!", develop similar protocols, and begin selling a product emphasizing the legal sharing aspects. (The current opinion implies they should look into trying to control copyright violation, though.) This makes the current court victory a very hollow one for the content oligopolies, despite being 9-0 in their favor.
The purpose of the hashes used in the.torrent file (the only portion relevant to the Copyright on the original) is only to validate that the file is an accurate reproduction
I thought that was clear, but yes. Therefore, the purpose of this "derived work" is to facilitate (accurate) (mass) reproduction, with or without copyright holders consent... more or less what I said before. Bad news for fair use claims.
Typically its the hard drive or power supply that dies.
Yah, but we didn't consider either of those serious. The school we had gone to had a Ghost site license which we all "forgot" to erase our copies of on leaving, making hard drive upgrades routine and painless. Add in the plummetting cost per GB of storage in the last decade, and they seldom were used as OS drives long enough to fail; they tended to end up as secondary storage for backups and pr0n.
We did kill some power supplies (the town's power is incredibly bad-- anything from 100 to 130 V at times, and the old house wiring didn't help). However, PSU deaths were low-impact. I had serious lack-of-power issues with one of my machines (eleven drives can do that, y'know) and ended up upgrading the PS twice before finally finding a high-end Forton unit that was adequate. This hunt left a couple PSUs around as quick swap loaner spares when needed, saving trips to the local computer store to buy them.
Intel produces chips that are inferior to and more expensive than their AMD counterparts, and yet they still have a stranglehold on many major PC and laptop vendors. Apart from really, really shitty customer service on AMD's part, what other explanation could there be?
Intel chips are inferior in performance, and pricier, but have lower "infant morality" perhaps from better QC, and longer life expectancies overall. I've seen far too many AMD CPUs fail after barely 3 years, while the Intel chips generally outlast the motherboard capacitors. My department at work white-boxes the desktops from a local supplier who is almost equally content to provide AMD or Intel as requested. We go Intel, because it makes for lower average annual computer expendatures, and because nobody gives a damn about the frame rate on Microsoft Word.
That "almost" above is because the shop owner also noted a MUCH higher failure rate in the floor model mini-PC's that were using AMD chips than the Intels-- to the point he actively recommends avoiding that particular combination, will not assemble AMD mini systems, and only carries the AMD minis as special order items.
How many of those AMD systems were overclocked? If you're living in a house of geeks with a dozen homebuilt systems, I can guarantee more than a few will be overclocked.
One AMD, one Intel. That AMD lasted barely six months, although this was not really the chip's fault-- the overclock cooling fan failed, and the chip toasted. The Intel rig was one of those wonderful old Celeron 300's overclocked to 450MHz. It was in main service for two years, then worked for another three running a web browser or word processor via KVM, while the newer machine was used for Evercrack. The hard drive failed right about when I moved out (I didn't do it!); the owner was using it as a print server with a Knoppix CD last I talked to him.
Having lived in a house full of geeks just out of college a couple years back, I'd say it's about an even split.
The good part about AMD chips is the price/performance level. The downside is the life expectancy. In the five years I was in the house, we had about a baker's dozen of homebuilt systems, 5 Intel and 8 AMD. The higher fraction AMD was in part due to a shorter life expectancy; the AMD chips tended to have overheating related failures within two or three years, while the Intel chips lasted until the machine was too slow for any real work and handed down to preteen relatives (about 5 years).
I suspect this is because AMD was working closer to the engineering and QC tolerances, and have not seen evidence suggesting this is likely to have changed.
Kind of like Smith and Wesson, they don't have bullet ridden dead bodies on there main page (I'm a little lazy and I didn't fact check this, its just a hunch)
Why not? It's not hard to find their website. As of 5PM today, two handguns, a flag, a racecar, and no bodies.
(I'll assume you're right that grokster is open source; there probably is something comparable and open source, anyway, and it isn't directly relevant to the question anyhow.)
Consider your question in the light of the orginal Sony case. Sony encourages people to buy the VCR for time-shifting TV; ScumCo (presumably avoiding any patent questions) makes and promotes their brand of VCR for widespread piracy. In light of the current and Sony ruling, Sony would probably be clear of liability (again) and ScumCo liable. A more interesting question is what happens if CleverCo join the game, and make no mention of piracy themselves, but merely take note the rising VCR market, and decide this would be a good thing to get in on.
Slashdot Mirror
No. However, it is not even remotely clear it was joking. Examinating the Internet Archive shows that the comment about this being a "parody" was added within the last 8 months; it may well have been added since the verdict. While the "musings" section it was under before it was unlinked from the front of his homepage (in roughtly the middle of 2003) is hardly on par with his "serious writings", the other musings are not exactly lists of lightbulb jokes or StarTrek slashfic, but rather more abstract pieces of still reasonably serious thought.
Furthermore, the time between statement and action is far shorter than you pretend. Bit torrent was first released in 2001; Bram is claiming that this screed was first released in 1999. However, after checking Google (as the blogosphere rapidly pollutes), Google's Usenet archive, and the Wayback Machine, I see no independent evidence of publication prior to Bittorrent coming on the scene circa 2001.
Also are the writers at Wired psychic? Did they look into his head and know what his "intent" was?
He stated flat out that he "built systems to [...] commit digital piracy" himself. Whether his intent with the article was parody or whether it was an honest assessment of his purposes would be a question of fact, which ergo must be determined by a jury. It would also be worth noting that his other conduct has been consistent with this manefesto; EG, "I release my code and writings freely, and publish all of my ideas early to make them unpatentable."
Intent is extreemly difficult to prove without a trail of acts all leading in the same direction. One statement does not a trail make.
Oh, agreed. But "the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step". This isn't fatal, but it's bad. There may be further evidence; I haven't been able to find any archive of the early BitTorrent developement mailing lists, but I'm not being paid $35 an hour as a paralegal researcher to do so.
Even if he intended the software for illegal use, that doesn't make the act of writing or even distributing it illegal.
No; promoting it for such use does.
Now, whether this constitutes evidence of promotion is a question that must be left to a jury. It does, however, seem a useful piece for the building of a case... although I am neither a Lawyer nor Judge to be certain.
A copyright violation did not occur until the first person transfered the first piece of copyrighted data. Then that person is PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE for the act.
True, and nothing will diminish that individual's personal responsibilty. However, this does not make Brad (arguably) ethically or (more important) legally immune from responsibility for his actions that led to this act. The concept of "accessory before the fact" exists in law and ethics alike; in which if these two disciplines are you arguing? (For details on the concept of contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, I suggest you refer to the milestone Fonovisa v. Cherry Auction case, along with the above cited MGM v. Grokster.)
Based on what you have written, if a person says, "I want to rob a bank." and they even post a few sec
Hey, I didn't start the comparison. And read more carefully-- the question is not whether P2P and guns should be legal, but whether someone who makes them should be liable for their unlawful use. In each case, if the intent of manufacture can be shown to be the unlawful use, then the manufacturer should share in the liability.
As far as I am concerned, both should remain legal. Fortunately, the current court ruling leaves P2P legal-- it merely declared open season on a couple of manufacturers bent on profiting primarily from those who commit piracy.
Excuse me? The item wired is indicating from his website implies that the intentions may have been illegal-- or more precisely, to encourage illegal acts, which in turn in this specific instance (copyright violation) is illegal. While the statutory basis of the concept of contributory copyright infringement in the Sony case might have been weak (the law is only explicit for patents), if the legislature disagreed they have had several decades to change the law and clarify their intentions if they wished to expressly only allow direct infringement. Despite a major revision of copyright law in the 1980's and the revisiting of such issues with the DMCA, they have not done this.
As such, your analogy has run into the iceberg of a cold and contradictory fact, and behaves much like any vessel in such conditions.
True; but when you state your opinions, you must realize the extent to which they will illuminate your future actions, and remember illumination when you take those actions, even in the case of civil disobedience.
Alas, this is not the case. Gun manufacturers do not advocate using guns to commit crimes; thus, they escape liability for the illegal actions of those who commit crimes with the aid of their products. Cohen may not be so well protected, and given this statement may be considered liable for contributory infringement.
Well, fortunately I've never put anything embarrassing up....
Thursday?
Umm... what about that part where he says: "I build systems to disseminate information, commit digital piracy..." (emphasis added).
This could be taken as prima facia evidence that part of his motivation in creating BitTorrent was and intent to induce people to commit piracy, and thus making him liable for contributory infringement. Not good.
Unfortunately, if you look at the Internet Archive of the website, and make your way though the various broken links to find the different vesions of the agenda, you'll see that this "parody" is not labeled as such until recently.... more recently than the archive shows, in fact. Perhaps changed after the ruling came down? Furthermore, it has been delinked from his current home page, although it used to reside under "Musings."
This leaves judging the intent problematic. While the other "musings" are not so serious as the "serious writings", they're not complete fluff either. This isn't going to be a laughing matter if it goes to court.
What becomes more important for the BitTorrent project is the extent to which Brad's demonstrated intentions may be taken as evidence for the intentions of other developers who worked with him on the project, a point which I was discussing in the followup to the case with someone.
Game theory may be more accurately described as a branch of mathematics, which has applications in many areas, including economics... and military theory.
Of all of the ones you point out, this is the only one I would argue that the allocation might be deserved. Ham Radio is bloody useful under emergency conditions, and it's operators should be encouraged even outside emergencies.
No. I believe the current "Church" of Scientology not to be a church, but rather an unindicted criminal conspiracy. The courts -- and Scientology's legal team -- disagree. =|
Some of the membership are doubtless true believers, and no more deluded than any other religion. Clambakes aside, the faith isn't any wackier than the "Jedi". However, speaking as someone raised Catholic, I would say the members of the current church leadership are in serious need of their own version of Martin Luther and 95 Theses nailed to their church doors.
It also might help if we could persuade our congresscritters that 18 USC 1839 part 3 should be modified to specifically exclude "religious scriptures" from eligibility for legal protection as trade secrets, thus pulling one of their more unwholesome legal fangs.
And this from other belief systems differs... how?
That's a case where you ought to ask a real lawyer-- and I'm not even a law student!
Speculating, I would guess that since the activities of SlimeCo are only evidence of SlimeCo's (criminal) intent, other folks who worked to develop the product would not be automatically at fault. However, it might (depending on the judge and lawyers involved) be admissible to some degree as supporting evidence of other parties' criminal intent-- EG, SlimeCo's intent was criminal, what makes you guys any different?
Furthermore, assuming that SlimeCo was the prime mover in such development, and doing so with the obvious purpose of (induced) massive copyright infringement, it is presumable that as with any other design process, the intention of the designers would be at least partially evident in the design. You might be able to avoid the legal hassle, especially if there was clear evidence elsewhere (EG: discussion on the development mailing list) showing that efforts were being made to try to prevent such infringement. The development team would want to have someone talk to the nice people at the EFF to find a lawyer (theirs or another) to advise them, if they don't have a handy lawyer already.
Ah, but you're forgetting the other of our two preconditions: distribution. Once company SlimeCo has demonstrated criminal intent, they are no longer able to distribute the product-- and that would include transfer of ownership to CleverCo. Participating in such a transfer attempt would be remarkably foolish for CleverCo, since they would risk being tainted with unclean hands, thereby knocking them out of the market and into a nasty liability. SlimeCo's product is an albatross around their neck.
Of course, as I noted, CleverCo can reinvent a product that does similar decentralized distribution: EG, BitTorrent. And as long as CleverCo makes sure to keep their hands clean and hire the legal team of Clever, Cleverer, and Vicious (with the ACLU and EFF filing amicus curia), then the ??AA's legal team of Dewey, Chatham, Fisher, and Howe is back to square minus one in their legal proceedings.
If they can legally do that, then I will admit that you thought this out better than I did and I'll cease being annoyed by the decision.
You can be annoyed if you want to keep being able to download MP3's of the pop charts without paying; however, if you're a fan of Indie music and various other media that use P2P with owners consent, you can be (mostly) relieved that P2P won't be killed outright.
The main worry in the ruling is that the court hinted that efforts should be made by P2P app makers to at least try to design to be able to prevent piracy. This is a non-trivial problem, and may effectively mandate nasty forms of DRM. But I can see several trivial modifications to BitTorrent can be made to at least indicate reasonable effort towards that, so my worries revert back to the general problem of court turnover under a Bush presidency. Given the current administration, you should worry more about new appointments allowing the re-examination of West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish than MGM v. Grokster.
Yes, but no.
The promotion is not the illegal part. It is the intent behind the promotion that is unlawful. The promotion is merely evidence of criminal intent. This is the key nuance it seems you fail to have grasped.
If you start at the other end of the statement, you'll first note that "you can't promote copyright infringement" (paraphrased, of course). There are two possible courses of action because there are two conditions that together cause the software to run afoul of the law. The first course assumes that the second condition will not be corrected, which is not necessarily the case.
Again, no; your paraphrasing is the problem. In fact, while I'd want to ask a lawyer (IANAL) and would not care to try the experiment, if someone were massively promoting copyright violation without doing so themself or distributing tools to aid doing so, a case might be made to consider this protected as free speech. (Consider "Steal This Book" and recent knock offs.)
The two preconditions are not "distribution" and "criminal promotion", but "distribution" and "criminal intent". I repeat: the promotion is only evidence of the intent. Internal e-mails saying "yay! aiding piracy is going to make us rich!" (which also exist in this case because these companies are run by morons) would serve equally well (once discovery finished), even with no external promotional campaign. And once you have demonstrated this criminal intent, the doctrine of unclean hands means "you can't distribute this kind of software," since that evidence forever more shows the pre-existing criminal intent.
Of course, this does not mean someone else who doesn't have "unclean hands" from involvement in the current screwup cannot say, "hey, P2P is cool!", develop similar protocols, and begin selling a product emphasizing the legal sharing aspects. (The current opinion implies they should look into trying to control copyright violation, though.) This makes the current court victory a very hollow one for the content oligopolies, despite being 9-0 in their favor.
I thought that was clear, but yes. Therefore, the purpose of this "derived work" is to facilitate (accurate) (mass) reproduction, with or without copyright holders consent... more or less what I said before. Bad news for fair use claims.
Yah, but we didn't consider either of those serious. The school we had gone to had a Ghost site license which we all "forgot" to erase our copies of on leaving, making hard drive upgrades routine and painless. Add in the plummetting cost per GB of storage in the last decade, and they seldom were used as OS drives long enough to fail; they tended to end up as secondary storage for backups and pr0n.
We did kill some power supplies (the town's power is incredibly bad-- anything from 100 to 130 V at times, and the old house wiring didn't help). However, PSU deaths were low-impact. I had serious lack-of-power issues with one of my machines (eleven drives can do that, y'know) and ended up upgrading the PS twice before finally finding a high-end Forton unit that was adequate. This hunt left a couple PSUs around as quick swap loaner spares when needed, saving trips to the local computer store to buy them.
Intel chips are inferior in performance, and pricier, but have lower "infant morality" perhaps from better QC, and longer life expectancies overall. I've seen far too many AMD CPUs fail after barely 3 years, while the Intel chips generally outlast the motherboard capacitors. My department at work white-boxes the desktops from a local supplier who is almost equally content to provide AMD or Intel as requested. We go Intel, because it makes for lower average annual computer expendatures, and because nobody gives a damn about the frame rate on Microsoft Word.
That "almost" above is because the shop owner also noted a MUCH higher failure rate in the floor model mini-PC's that were using AMD chips than the Intels-- to the point he actively recommends avoiding that particular combination, will not assemble AMD mini systems, and only carries the AMD minis as special order items.
YMMV.
One AMD, one Intel. That AMD lasted barely six months, although this was not really the chip's fault-- the overclock cooling fan failed, and the chip toasted. The Intel rig was one of those wonderful old Celeron 300's overclocked to 450MHz. It was in main service for two years, then worked for another three running a web browser or word processor via KVM, while the newer machine was used for Evercrack. The hard drive failed right about when I moved out (I didn't do it!); the owner was using it as a print server with a Knoppix CD last I talked to him.
The good part about AMD chips is the price/performance level. The downside is the life expectancy. In the five years I was in the house, we had about a baker's dozen of homebuilt systems, 5 Intel and 8 AMD. The higher fraction AMD was in part due to a shorter life expectancy; the AMD chips tended to have overheating related failures within two or three years, while the Intel chips lasted until the machine was too slow for any real work and handed down to preteen relatives (about 5 years).
I suspect this is because AMD was working closer to the engineering and QC tolerances, and have not seen evidence suggesting this is likely to have changed.
Why not? It's not hard to find their website. As of 5PM today, two handguns, a flag, a racecar, and no bodies.
Consider your question in the light of the orginal Sony case. Sony encourages people to buy the VCR for time-shifting TV; ScumCo (presumably avoiding any patent questions) makes and promotes their brand of VCR for widespread piracy. In light of the current and Sony ruling, Sony would probably be clear of liability (again) and ScumCo liable. A more interesting question is what happens if CleverCo join the game, and make no mention of piracy themselves, but merely take note the rising VCR market, and decide this would be a good thing to get in on.