Re: Is phpGrabComics legal?
On Sat, Jan 22, 2005 at 01:30:33AM +0000, Henning Makholm wrote:
> However, I don't think that there is any need for either Debian or the
> software author to fear things here. We already distibute several
> peer-to-peer filesharing implementations whose major real-life use is
> to distribute unlicensed copies of musical and cinematographic
> works. However, the software itself is not illegal to maintain or
> distribute because some legitimate uses have been cooked up.
Those legitimate uses were not "cooked up"; they were there from the
get-go, and were always intended. Even if you do believe otherwise, I
think it is rather irresponsible of you to say so in this forum.
Whatever the developers' intentions, however, it does appear that the
use driving widespread adoption of these technologies is indeed the
downloading of unlicensed copies of works such as you mention.
While this may be perfectly legal in certain jurisdictions, it would
be nice to see the more commonly legitimate uses gain a little ground too.
I guess Bittorrent seems to be leading the field in this at the moment.
Maybe we should encourage distribution of Debian CD images using
Gnutella -- publish the MD5sums prominently, and describe how to check
them when downloading using gnutella.
Anyone else think this might be a good idea?
Cheers,
Nick
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