A Big Blow for P2P

Software — Joe Anderson @ 5:34 pm Monday 27 June 2005

The US Supreme Court has ruled that file-sharing companies are to blame for what users do with their software.

BBC NEWS | Technology | File-sharing suffers major defeat

Due to this ruling the music, movie and software industries could sue the likes of KaZaa, Morpheus, Grokster and many other P2P companies could be sued.

I think one thing we need to remember is that P2P is essential to the distribution of open-source software. Why? The (unpaid) developers can’t afford the bandwidth required to distribute open-source software, especially Linux builds (which can be upto 5GB big!), so P2P is cheap and quite efficient.

One thing I wonder is how the industries will sue open-source software/protocols such as Gnutella or Bittorrent.

I’m not going into the legal details, as to tell you the truth I don’t care, but the implications on open-source software.

This move will make many companies to scared to produce P2P networking software, with good right, and will make distribution of Linux and other open-source software nearly impossible.

This will lead to extra profit for Microsoft.

Hang on, I have an idea!

What the world need is a secure, fast and moderated P2P network, especially for distributing open-source and freeware. Perhaps a dedicated team should only allow content to be distributed with the written consent of the copyright owner or a license stating they can do so.

I know we all like a bit of piracy, but there’s always the WWW for MP3s!

http://www.billboard.com/bb/daily/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000968842

http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA621561.html?display=Breaking+News

http://www.kbcafe.com/iBLOGthere4iM/?guid=20050627100817

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