OT: US Supreme Court: Litigous open season on P2P File Sharing

Dont like getting into political issues but this has an effect on software development...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/27/AR2005062700471_pf.html

Big ramifications I am sure, looking at the broader picture here - the US Supreme court has said that software developers can be held liable in the case their software/service is used in an illegal manner, regardless of your purpose or intent in development and the provision of the service.

Sad...

The problem is with one's interpretation of intent, Souter says that someone who distributes something..."with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright..." is liable for the acts performed with the software. Fine but who decides what the object promotes, once again lending vagueness to a ruling which can and most certainly will be abused by lawyers everywhere.

Couple this with the outrageous eminent domain decision that gives the government power to seize your private property for purposes other than the 'public use' and we have fulfilled the fear of Lincoln and resigned our government to an eminent tribunal.

2 Comments

  • On the principle that "anything you say can and will be held against you in the court of law" (kind of similar to the Supreme Court's decision), is Microsoft liable for hackers that use it's OS for breach of privacy and stuff like that?



    And extending the decision to every imaginable domain of activity, not just software, and not just copyright, is a hammer-producing company liable for my actions if I use it to break someone's head instead of nails?



    And we get to the all-times-favorite subject of fire arm manufacturing. They are allowed to make and distribute stuff that breaks my "copyright" on my own existence and yet they're not liable for its use?



    In the end, is the US Supreme liable for its decisions (software is decisions and vice-versa) even if they were taken (written, from a software point of view) with good intent?



    My ideas may be a little off-track, but I don't think I'm too far from the truth.

  • Oh, this just hit me: Microsoft's IE, Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari are all capable of downloading stuff from the Net. Are there legal entities liable of anything? :)



    Same goes for anything that can copy/transfer information, like Xerox copyers...

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