Life after the P2P judgement of the Supreme Court
After a lengthy wait, a US Supreme Court held that providers of P2P services could be held liable for infringement made by the users of these programs. Technology developers are complaining that this will hinder the development of new technologies as they believe that developers should not be held liable for infringements by the users of these technologies as they claim that these technologies are meant to be used in legal ways and they should not be held liable because users choose to use it in an illegal way. The case that developers relied on in the past is the case of Sony’s Betamax, where Sony was not held liable for claimed infringements by the users of the Betamax VCR. Regardless, the court held that the developers of these P2P software actively promoted illegal download of copyright work and they should be held liable.
I think, and hope, that this would not affect BitTorrent, which is a P2P transfer technology that is used to distribute large files. Though it is has become the main method of sharing movies online, it is also being used by companies and developers to share and transfer large files without paying so much for bandwidth. There were recent rumours and Microsoft of using some sort of BitTorrent technology to transfer patches and updates for its coming Longhorn.
Another thing that makes this judgement unlikely to affect BitTorrent is that using the client on its own does not usually give you the opportunity to download files from other computers as BitTorrent clients require an online tracker for each file shared and a .torrent file to initiat the downloading processs by the leaching user from the the seeding.
BitTorrent is NOT an alternative to your regular P2P, but it is another way of sharing files that are usually large. Illegal music websites usually archive torrents for whole music album packages.
Even though the judgement could be held as some precedent for cases all over the world, but it is still very unlikely for record labels to be able to sue companies that are not directly related to the US. We shoudl continue to see clients that are operated from outside the US, but the significant decrease of the number of users might mean the end of this form of file sharing.
