P2P File Sharing News Comments 2006-10-06
I agree with TechDirt – Massive infringment, and being negligent about it – continuing development despite knowing 90-95% of shared content is copyright infringing, is not active inducement. Inducement would be in the program’s interface, the hosting website, the marketing, or even the tech support. The LA Times article mentioned tech support inducement. That would fit the supreme court ruling. I bet it was a evidence-collection motivated prank by the RIAA (like the fake Emule). I think for the tech support to be inducing, it would have to be explicit, not generic, like “if you want more elvis on the network, you have to share more elvis”, or tutoring the user to make a more intelligent search specifically for elvis, rather a generic ‘what is on the network is only what other users share” or a generic, context-less search tutorial. A denial of support if the user wants help specifically about a copyrighted item would help a lot. Open source P2P file sharing is very resistant of being nailed on tech-support inducement because their usually isn’t much, if any at all, developer-direct tech support. Well it seems that the RIAA / MPAA has reduce their standards to fighting the ability to run a legit, profitable business off of file sharing. And the non-profit sector who either refuse and resist or just hand-off the code to somebody else, continue to make P2P that transfers whole movies and discoagrphies without error and is resistant to RIAA / MPAA / mob hacker / leecher curruption.
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BitTorrent has a lot of potential for bandwidth abuse. They need to look out for AMule, Lphant, and MLDonkey clients also. The people using BitTorrent to leech appear to be most of it. Some host trackers files explicitly illegal or legal. Moderation overhead is too high to control the abuse. The abuse is hogging all the bandwidth. Enough clients and especialy trackers and pig the CPU off of a shared server also. They shuld only allow standalone trackers and not clients, and they have to be remote seeded. I can’t think of a way to specifically enforce that though. They probably should just run one or more of their own private tracker servers and allow only customers to seed it. I don’t know if you can make trackers accept torrent seeds with a password without passwording all access though. I guess a local link to the file will have to be sent to an administrator for seeding on the tracker and then he’ll reply back with the .torrent file.
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Get looking on Emule!
