On Monday the US Supreme Court rules that companies that create
peer-to-peer applications designed, and promoted to encourage copyright
infringment could be held liable for the copyright infringment.
Peer-to-peer companies such as Grokster and Morpheus parent StreamCast
Networks can be sued and held legally liable for the copyright
infringement of the people using their software, if the companies
actively encourage that infringement. Any company that knowingly
provides a home for widespread copyright infringement, is at risk of
being held liable. The test will be whether they actively and knowingly
encouraged that piracy.
BitTorrent will not face many problems from this ruling. First off,
its becoming harder to shut down. The main tracker system is changing
and BT is becoming a tracker-less. More imporantly, the main purpose of
BT is to distribute large files, and it is often used for linux
distributions, and other open source software. What’s more, is that
there is not one company, there are multiple companies that create
BitTorrent clients. No developer of BitTorrent clients could be held
liable for their programs.
No Comments