Sought for MGM v. Grokster: Non-Infringing P2P Use 377
linuxizer writes "Since my last Slashdot entry, I've been discussing various copyright issues with the ever-interesting Peter Fader. Out of those conversations came sniu.info, an attempt to document the various forms of substantial, non-infringing use over peer-to-peer networks before MGM v Grokster goes to the Supreme Court. So far I have about 50 entries, but more suggestions would be much appreciated.
Some fellow /. readers might also be interested in my fairly regular posts on copyright/IP issues, which are mostly links to interesting articles with occasional commentary."
Misleding (Score:2, Insightful)
Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Assault rifles, and guns in general, aren't "evil" or are built to serve nefarious purposes.
Similarly, P2P networks can solve a host of distribution issues.
It's the idiots that use them for illegal purposes (assault rifles, guns, or P2P networks) that cause the problems. Since the world is made up mostly of idiots, well... there you go.
A distinction may be drawn (Score:4, Insightful)
Legal uses of BitTorrent have been shown, but legit uses of Kazaa and Grokster are slim from what I've seen.
You might argue that you could distribute public domain works, or GPL works, over Kazaa/Grokster but for things like Linux ISOs, BT works better and for low priority things HTTP and FTP work quite well.
And please, people, don't bring up the "we should make all X illegal" analogy.
Re:Well... (Score:1, Insightful)
Porn (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:BT has a valid use, for example. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:4, Insightful)
And though we'll never have conclusive, accurate metrics on leval vs. illegal use of P2P, common sense tells me that the majority of users aren't downloading the latest version of Gentoo.
Re:Censored? No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ummm. there were no video/picture that were "censored from the US".
Except for the more graphic images of US military personel torturing foreigners. And killing them during "questioning." And the bodies of US service men coming home. And who knows what else, because when stuff is being censored you don't necessarily know it.
Remember, this is the country that routinely dropped colour from video taken "behind the iron curtain", leaving the impression that everything there was black-and-white. The country that loudly objected to the development of biological weapons anywhere, by anyone, until some of our congress critters got mailed samples of weaponized anthrax we had made in our biological weapons labs. Oops.
Our legislators pass laws without reading them, in some cases without being allowed to read them and/or discuss them, and we pass laws which average citizens are not allowed to own a copy of.
If you think there are no images censored from the US, you are nuts.
--MarkusQ
Re:BT has a valid use, for example. (Score:5, Insightful)
Say a politician wants to ban cars because they can be used to cause so much death and destruction. Someone wants a list of safe, legal applications for cars. Well, there's driving to work, driving to school, fetching groceries, etc.
Considering the abundance and usefulness of all the successful and purpose-built functionality cars have, would makes they make a damned fine counterweight for turning a cherry picker into a trebuchet really carry much weight? Probably not, and neither should the failure of Blizzard's awful BitTorrent implimentation.
Sure, it can be used that way, but it's not particularly well-suited to it, and it sort of caught me off guard that considering what (legal) uses P2P technologies do use, one of the lamest implimentations yet was the first to be mentioned.
Local Distributed Storage Solution (Score:3, Insightful)
The point here is that by going the P2P route rather than a fixed central server model, you both balance the network bandwith, particularly for "distant" nodes, and you allow the redundancy that the internet is so hyped over (you can nuke any node and the rest will compensate) but in practice is far from the truth. In theory you can still lose some data, but with a well built P2P network of this nature that could be minimized, and only seldom accessed data would be the most vunerable.
Another big plus of this is that not only does this type of storage system work well for limited bandwidth, you can also install more modest "almost thin terminals" into such a network that keeps only frequently accessed data locally, and other nodes can compensate with data storage elsewhere.
Unfortunately, I havn't seen any really good examples of this. Freenet comes close in theory, but even that has some ways to go to do this effectively.
Re:BT has a valid use, for example. (Score:3, Insightful)
You're opening up a can of worms with that argument. You have to be above a certain age and licensed to drive a vehicle, and their use is HEAVILY regulated.
Same goes with the gun argument. People kill people, not guns; but that doesn't mean you want to compare it to P2P use.
A better example is the classic MPAA vs Sony argument (I think it was sony. the VHS case). MPAA thought it would be the death of the film industry, that it would let massive piracy take place. It didn't. VHS had plenty of valid uses, and some not-so-legitimate.
I think.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Should such a religious change to our laws (basically the "Am I not my brother's keeper?" question) should never be allowed into our laws or court system. If you think about it, our whole basis for our life here is the statement that everyone is entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. No where does the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, or the Bill of Rights say that we are all responsible for what everyone else does. All of it just states that we are responsible for our own actions. Which is why a murderer is put on trial and not his friends, enemies, family, and the like (so long as they did not participate of course). It is the same with these companies. Just because they make a piece of software which could be used in a harmful way against companies such as MGM is no excuse to hold them responsible for another party's usage of their software. Just like it is no excuse to hold a VCR production company responsible for how a VCR is used. Or Radio Shack for carrying the parts necessary to build a cable box which circumvents the cable company's security measures. Or Intel because its CPU chips were used to create a new virus. The allusions are ridiculous. The entire country can not function if such a law were passed. George Bush's "We are a litigious society," will be absolutely true. For no company will be able to function under such a law.
I believe that, as Americans, we should all go out and file lawsuits against every major company for psychological damage to our brains for being asked to function under laws which contradict the very basis of the manner in which this country was not only founded (ie: Freedom to do as you please) but to even work in this country (ie: If you get a job then you have denied someone else that very job).
Think about it. You really can't even respond to this message because you will have broken the copyright laws as they now stand. Why? Because you have to first get my permission to even reference this message. We ignore that here and respond anyway but this is just another example of common sense versus stupidity when it comes to crafting laws.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
E-mail (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:HEY MODERATORS GET A FUCKING CLUE (Score:2, Insightful)
If two people post the same thing, then one of those messages is redundant. It's unfortunate that the downmod will result in a karma-loss for the recepient, but that's a bug in Slashcode, not a fault of the mods.
If 100 people post at exactly the same time posting the same anecdote, do you think everyone reading /. should have to wade through them?
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
I love this myth that "Assualt rifles" were specifically to kill human beings. The Geneva Conventions actually have made them be developed for entirely a different purpose and it is most definitely and amazingly not to kill human beings. Assault rifles were built to WOUND people.
You see in combat if you wound a soldier it takes out of action 2 or 3 buddies as well. Killing him usually just gets his buddies mad! It is much more effective to wound. This is also why land mines are most often calculated to blow off a leg or a foot.
Acutally the nice 30.06 rifle of the earlier times of US Combat was a most effective Killing weapon. That is why the USA Hunters tend to prefer it or variants of it such as the accelerator versions at lower dimensions. I suppose this might hurt the feelings of those wanting to regulate guns but it illustrates how arguments get smashed out of reality in such topics.
To apply this to P2P networks is a pretty good example. The arguments are just plain wierd. P2P is nothing but what the name says. Communication between two parties without the moderation of a third party. Of course this private communication lets in people who do illegal things. Of course it is nothing more nor less than communications. There is nothing really wrong about it.
I remember in the early days of Cell Phones and Pagers, many facilities assumed that children with these devices were trading drugs. (It started out that way too!) Rapidly other uses developed and most if not all kids using cell phones and pagers is now legitimate. I assume P2P is going to do about the same. Outlawing it serves no purpose.
Re:Censored? No. (Score:3, Insightful)
This happens all the time, especially with omnibus finance and transportation bills. The final version (all several thousand pages of it) often comes out of conference with only hours to spare before the vote.
Re:BT has a valid use, for example. (Score:3, Insightful)
To enumerate a few:
1) Distributed source versioning (several open source projects working on this)
2) Collaborative work environments (ala MS Exchange, Lotus Notes (not saying good environments), etc etc ad nauseum)
3) Social networks ala Friendster that allow data exchange
4) peered IRC/IM networks
5) Distributed peered backup / data archival networks (a personal favorite)
6) Distributed database applications
7) DNS
8) Distributed load sharing applications (ala bit torrent and others - automated mirroring stuff fits in here)
9) Grid computing applications ala SETI etc
I could go on and on. The reason *most* applications are not peer to peer is that these sort of networks are the most difficult to build algorithms around and to model. Remember the early conflict between 'distributed' database applications and 'relational' databases? The reason the relational class of databases won in the end was that no one could build a properly functional distributed database protocol. Parallel operations are almost always more complex than sequential ones.
*Any* server network is simply a peer to peer network with a restricted set of peers and limited functionality. All networks are essentially special cases of the general case we can refer to as peer to peer networks!
To continue, the *internet* is essentially a special purpose peer to peer network - so my question is why distinguish the very specialized class of peer to peer networks designed to do anonymous file sharing from all the other very real and non infringing purposes we use or will likely use peered computing for?
Clearly this separation is a ploy by organizations interested in regulating a very specific use of peer to peer networks that has been *bought* hook line and sinker by those of us in the opposition.
Letting your opponents define the terms under which you argue is always a loosing proposition. Dont let special interest groups redefine 'peer to peer' networks so easily!
Besides, this is going to be a moot question at some point soon - there are enough interested parties trying to design and build fully anonymous and encrypted peer to peer protocols (some functional prototype projects exist and provide varying degrees of protection) that my suspicion is that we will have at least one cryptographically secure anonymous network protocol within the next 18-24 months.
I could go on and on, but I will refrain.