Kazaa ruled illegal

Will the ruling against Kazaa set off a domino effect across every P2P application used to share files?

The truth is that the problem can shift from the provider, like Kazaa, to the users of the program.

Copyright exists, and we must respect it; piracy is wrong. Whether those rights carry a price or not is another matter. Many of us believe it is good to protect intellectual property rights, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we should charge exorbitant sums of money for them, just a fair price for our work. I prefer to think that a user of my programs values them, and the price I set depends on the value it brings the user plus the effort. But that’s one criterion.

Plenty of people make their content, songs, books, blogs, source code, available to the community without charging anything. Others set certain restrictions: if the content is going to be used commercially, then they want a share of the business. That is the basis of Creative Commons, for example.

The interesting thing is that there is a lot of free software, with its rights protected, which makes piracy even harder to justify.

If you want to use Office, you have to buy it; if you don’t have the money you have alternatives, like OpenOffice.

There is no justification for piracy

P2P networks, unfortunately, are used for piracy, and the consequences of that behavior are showing up in these court rulings. You can argue that it isn’t the technology’s fault that users put it to these ends, but that has to be proven in court. The bad part is that I think it’s a somewhat lost fight.

There is, however, one matter with no legal definition, as far as I know: if I write a piece of software for sharing files, I am not guilty when someone sets up a service, or a network, based on that software.

(One more thing: Kazaa was so full of security holes that maybe it’s a good thing this is happening to it :)