On Thu, Jun 06, 2002 at 05:47:44PM +0100, Richard Dobson wrote: > Yes but there is a significant difference, ISP's and backbone providers are > providing simply providing data paths, Jabber is an application on top of > that backbone facilitating the data sharing, the ISP's network on its own > without applications transferring data over it is not facilitating the data > sharing, applications such as Jabber and Kazza are which is why Jabber is at > risk from legal proceedings.
Kazaa, Gnutella, Napster (in it's time) don't even facilitate the data transfer. They simply provide a handshaking service that introduces one node to another node, at which point they transfer their data without intervention of the authoritative servers. This is the fundamental property of peer-to-oeer networks. Unfortunately, even these activities have already been deemed illegal. It's not all that far fetched (from a legal perspective) that these precedents could apply equally to web browsers, email clients, smtp servers, ftp server, web servers, virtually anything in fact. The reason Napster was singled out was not because it allowed copywritten information to be illegally distributed, but because it's users overwhelmingly chose to use it for that task. The single thing that binds all these products together is the use of a global searching mechanism. As long as Jabber doesn't implement this, I don't see how it could possibly be singled out for piracy complaints.
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