I am very disappointed in the ruling today by the Supreme Court that says file sharing services can be sued even though they are not the ones doing the sharing.
This decision allows the MPAA, RIAA, and other organizations to stomp out P2P, by going after the developers. This is going to get ugly, and a lot of people better be hiring lawyers.
This ruling means that the people who have created P2P tool’s like BlogTorrent which I use to distribute my Podcast or BitTorrent can now be sued, because those applications do not have some industry generated Digital Rights Management component built in to stop copyrighted materials from being shared. This means they have to build in DRM so I can share a text file that is open source.
This will not kill P2P, but I can guarantee the next killer P2P application that is built, will be done so without anyone claiming responsibility.
This is a travesty in a big way, and definitely a loss of Fair Use proponents. Their are a large number of legitimate uses of P2P which are now in danger of extinction, not only will developers be targeted but Internet Service Providers probably will be as well, as they can, and will be held liable for P2P traffic on their networks .
I distribute my Podcast via P2P and I will never wrap the show up with a DRM wrapper. That just destroys the medium and goes against everything we are trying to create with the open media revolution. This is a sad day.
That said I am not surprised by their decision, as it is obvious that the millions of dollars organizations like the MPAA, and the RIAA are spending to try and save their failing industry, will continue to happen so that they can win at all cost.
My charge is simple do not buy any product that the RIAA or MPAA is aligned with, plain and simple. [Dan Gillmor] [Wired]
NOTE: Please read and listen to the coverage by the [EFF]
Come on! take a good look at yourself people, you whine when your rights get messed with, but what if you had a band? or was an actor? dont tell me you would not feel violated by fileswapping.
The truth is that the only reason people are upset is that now they cant commit crimes anymore, it is in the law you can NOT take copyright material for free in any way.
So honestly people, the RIAA are humans too, they need to be protected by the law as much as you do, and me coming from a country where they pay 3 times as much for DVD’s and Music as you do in America makes me laugh at you.
If you cant afford a measely $15 for DVD’s at Walmart or freaking $7 a month for Yahoo Music Unlimited, then it is really really sad.
So comeon if they passed a bill that prevented your stuff from being stolen, would you react this way?