Ars has a good article reminding us of an important fact about peer-to-peer tools like BitTorrent: while they certainly can be used for illegal and unethical purposes, they’re ultimately just tools. They also have indisputably legal and legitimate uses—in this case, rapidly deploying software updates on a campus network. One of the reasons that stopping piracy is only going to get harder over time is that as peer-to-peer tools mature, it will become more and more difficult to distinguish “good” and “bad” peer-to-peer tools. The tools will be increasingly ubiquitous and powerful, and there won’t be any easy way for the authorities to restrict their use to legal purposes.
I think this is one reason that the Grokster decision (in which I reluctantly concluded that the plaintiffs had the better argument) is likely to be a pyrrhic victory for the copyright industry. The Supreme Court said that if there’s clear evidence that a company’s product is designed to facilitate file-sharing, then that company can be held liable for contributory infringement. But that test makes it pretty easy to avoid liability. BitTorrent appears to be navigating it successfully, and others will doubtless do the same.
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