To follow-up on Tim's comments about the safety to be had from
publihsing p2p software anonymously, and the risks of not doing so,
this is an interesting analysis of the topic by Berkeley Centre for
Law & Technology lawyer Fred von Lohmann, hosted by EFF.
IAAL: Peer-to-Peer File Sharing and Copyright Law after Napster
http://www.eff.org/IP/P2P/Napster/20010309_p2p_exec_sum.html
The discussion of contributory and vicarious copyright arguments is an
eye-opener (the full paper goes into more detail). My conclusion
after reading this (well before also actually, but it re-enforced the
view) is that the safest and simplest thing to do is to just publish
such software anonymously.
Ian Clarke of freenet has a lot to say about copyright vs freedom of
speech.
http://freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Main/Philosophy
He's right there is a conflict between anonymous censor-resistant
publication systems and as I've said a number of times over the years,
I figure sooner or later DMCA, WIPO et al are going to run into
remailers, and p2p systems designed for publisher anonymity; and then
we're likely to see a head on battle ala USG against strong crypto,
but with the battle between freedom-of-expression and anonymous
publication systems and copyright. Ultimately there isn't room for
both strong anonymity and strong copyright enforcement, it's another
binary choice. Already we're seeing battles between copyright
enforcers where the strong-copyright lobby has the staggering hubris
to attempt to outlaw general purpose computers without copyright
enforcement hardware builtin.
If I recall there was a brief skirmish between a remailer operator and
SPA (software publishers association -- the bit police for software
bits) when someone anonymously constructed some "designer abuse" and
then themselves reported it to the SPA in an attempt to shut-down the
remailer.
Adam
