Tag: Peer-to-Peer
-
GAO Data: Porn Rare on P2P; Filters Ineffective
P2P nets have fewer pornographic images than the Web, and P2P porn filters are ineffective, according to data in a new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). Mind you, the report’s summary text says pretty much the opposite, but where I come from, data gets more credibility than spin. The data can be…
-
BitTorrent: The Next Main Event
Few tears will be shed if Grokster and StreamCast are driven out of business as a result of the Supreme Court’s decision. The companies are far from lovable, and their technology is yesterday’s news anyway. A much more important issue is what the rules will be for the next generation of technologies. Here the Court…
-
Patry: The Court Punts
William Patry (a distinguished copyright lawyer) offers an interesting take on Grokster. He says that the court was unable to come to agreement on how to apply the Sony Betamax precedent to Grokster, and so punted the issue.
-
Legality of Design Decisions, and Footnote 12 in Grokster
As a technologist I find the most interesting, and scariest, part of the Grokster opinion to be the discussion of product design decisions. The Court seems to say that Sony bars liability based solely on product design (p. 16): Sony barred secondary liability based on presuming or imputing intent to cause infringement solely from the…
-
BitTorrent Search
BitTorrent.com released a new search facility yesterday, making it slightly easier to find torrent files on the Net. This is an odd strategic move by BitTorrent.com – it doesn’t help the company’s customers much, but mostly just muddles the company’s public messaging. [Backstory about BitTorrent: The BitTorrent technology allows efficient Internet distribution of large files…
-
Cornell Researchers on P2P Quality Control
Kevin Walsh and Emin Gün Sirer, of Cornell University, have a new paper on Credence, a system for detecting unwanted files in P2P networks. It’s a kind of reputation system for files, designed to detect in advance that certain files are not what they claim to be. One use of this technology is to detect…