From owner-cvs-all Sun Jul 30 10:22:43 2000 Delivered-To: cvs-all@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (zoom2-003.telepath.com [216.14.2.3]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id A139937B534 for ; Sun, 30 Jul 2000 10:22:32 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mwm@mired.org) Received: (qmail 21111 invoked by uid 100); 30 Jul 2000 17:15:47 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <14724.25283.195876.310110@guru.mired.org> Date: Sun, 30 Jul 2000 12:15:47 -0500 (CDT) To: cvs-all@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: cvs commit: ports/audio/opennap - Imported sources In-Reply-To: References: X-Mailer: VM 6.72 under 21.1 (patch 10) "Capitol Reef" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-cvs-all@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > From: Peter Wemm > Exactly. But there is a big "but!". Suppose Metalica (for want of a > better example) sues you for contributory copyright infringement. Suppose > it is going to cost you over $100K to practically get past the first base > to say in court "I have done nothing wrong". It doesn't matter if you are > right or not, once you're out of pocket on those sort of amounts it starts > killing you. The lawyers know this damn well, and will abuse that to make > sure you cannot afford to contest it and that they win by default. Why should this go to court? The RIAA contacted napster "a number of times, including in writing" to try and get them to stop the copyright violations. Napster couldn't do that without closing up shop. On the other hand, marking the various napster client ports RESTRICTED and deleting the packages - or even deleting the ports - wouldn't do any serious harm to FreeBSD. There's no real reason to take either of those actions before getting a "cease and desist" letter from someone, though. That doesn't mean there's no possibility of lawsuit, but that's always true. After all, there are a couple of gnutella clients, which are also file distribution utilities like napster. Come to think of it, the core includes file distribution utilities which can be used that way. All those are possible lawsuit targets, but all are unlikely. Napster is currently high profile (which is probably why this port drew that reaction, but the earlier ones didn't) and maybe slightly more risky, but the ability to just say "Ok, we won't distribute that anymore" makes the cost associated with that risk very low.