July 6, 2005
In light of the the recent victory in the Supreme Court, in cases between
MGM and Grokster, US-based organizations such as the RIAA (Record Industry Association
of America) and the MPAA are excited about the turn of events.
Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that the companies developing P2P (peer-to-peer)
applications can be sued for the actions taken by their users provided the
application has been developed and promoted to be used for illegal content sharing.
Industry observers now fear that these companies might target Bittorrent
technology and their application developers for similar suits as they are also
used on a mass level for exchanging digital content.
This protocol was developed by Barm Cohen and is a file-sharing program that
distributes large files quickly by breaking them into many pieces, sharing the pieces
among a large number of users, and reassembling them upon delivery. It even inspired
Microsoft to come up with their own version in Microsoft Avalanche.
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The RIAA and the MPAA already have succeeded in getting some of the most
popular Bittorrent hosting websites on the Internet closed down, accusing them
of making available pirated content on the internet.
Additionally, they might consider taking the legal route as well. However,
experts say that Bittorrent is expected to fair better in legal battles if such
a situation arises.
Mark Schultz, an associate law professor at Southern Illinois University said
in a statement: “Bittorrent has a more realistic case for non-infringing users
than Grokster or the others ever had. The developer didn’t set out to trade
Ammonium or Britney Spears.
But we have to be realistic because we know it’s used for massive illegal file
sharing.”
Source: Search Engine Journal
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