On Fri, 12 Dec 2008 12:44:10 -0500 Dennis Nezic <dennisn at dennisn.dyndns.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Dec 2008 22:29:09 +0000, Matthew Toseland > <toad at amphibian.dyndns.org> wrote: > > > If I were to have grounds to believe you were using Freenet - even > > 0.5 - to pirate music, I'd have to block you in my procmail ... > > PLEASE DO NOT USE FREENET TO VIOLATE COPYRIGHT LAW ! Per Grokster vs > > MGM, we cannot provide technical support to known pirates. > > Fortunately freenet is designed precisely to take away any such grounds > of belief. > > Though, personally, I would actually *encourage* everyone to violate > copyright law. Since it itself violates the more important > constitutional law--namely, to paraphrase, our right to freely do > whatever we want in the dark confined privacy of our bedrooms. Whatever the personal opinion of the single Freenet developers/contributors might be (and we don't want to know), the Freenet Project can't afford legal suits from the rich, powerful, and politically tied media industry. IMHO negative media attention is better than no media attention, but the problem is that at least some of those lawsuits will be lost, with many financial and legal consequences possibly leading to the project being forcibly shut down or bankrupted, or both, leading to the end of the Freenet project. Terefore, the official policy of the Freenet project MUST be to heavily discourage copyright-infringing use of Freenet and deny support to known "pirates" -this last detail is necessary in order to cut any possible legal bound that a clever lawyer could try to use in court. If the Freenet project is sued for copyright infringement, Ian or who ever gets to represent the project in court can always claim that official members of the Freenet crew adhere to a strict anti-piracy policy, refusing to even *talk* to copyright "pirates". This is a matter of survival, the project must go on and in order to finish the job Freenet needs to protect itself from the possibility of law suits.
