On Wed, Feb 02, 2005 at 04:01:42PM -0500, Donavan Stanley wrote: > On Wed, 2 Feb 2005 10:32:12 -0800, Brad Templeton > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > But the paranoid are clever, and good at the game. For example, I recall > > seing a quote that because of fear of lawsuits, MythTV would probably > > never incorporate the sort of features that really raise the wrath of > > the MPAA, like filesharing gateways. > > It's not simply fear of lawsuits that prevents the core developers > from implementing such features or accepting patches that implment > such features. It's the fact that we're aware of the difference > between right and wrong, legal and illegal. There are a LOT of cool > things one could do if Myth were P2P enabled, however few of them are > legal so we choose to do the right thing and not implement P2P.
Well, this is the can of worms. Should we not make a useful technology because some of the users will use it for ill? What number of users makes the difference? A few users? Most of the users? Almost all of the users? The law has forbidden it when it's all of the users (ie. the technology has no other purpose than breaking the law) but the supreme court has said that as long as there are significant legit uses, the technology can be built. They are reviewing that doctrine this year, we're parties to the case. You're asking however a slightly different question, which is what do you _want_ to create, as opposed to what's legal to build, and the answer can indeed be different, but it's not easy. And no question in some places, they make the decision based on fear or pressure, which is exactly why the studios sued Replay over their commercial skip, to create such fear. And why we countersued the studios to get a declaration that the users were not criminals for using such products. Would you have written bittorrent? Clearly BT is being used for distributing infringing works but it's also the best way to get new linux ISOs and is growing as a method of distributing things like independent films. I myself would also not feel motivated to build a tool that became almost entirely a platform for piracy. But there are many compelling applications that I could see wanting to create. The use of bittorrent is, as I already noted, being seen as a way to bypass the networks in order to distribute independent film and video. An application that let people, from their set-top-box, select openly distributable independent videos and then downloaded them efficiently could change the very nature of television distribution. By this I mean, if your neighbour next-door has the video, you get it from them rather than a central server. Indeed, I have described a vision on my web site I call poor man's video on demand, which could replace the existing TV distribution infrastructure of cable TV and satellite, using only slower (1 megabit connections) today. It's based on the idea that we don't care as much as they think about getting our video now-now-now. We are quiety happy -- as Mythtv and even Netflix show -- to select a video and then have it show up days later to watch it. This would be really interesting, and could even support paying for content to support an industry. But it could also be a platform for copyright infringement. So how do you decide?
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