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June 30, 2005, 02:21 PM ET
Supporting Piracy or Making a Point?
Will BitTorrent, the network popular with movie swappers, be the next peer-to-peer service to face legal problems? Or is post-Grokster hysteria beginning to set in? Legal experts are debating those questions after discovering a manifesto advocating digital piracy on the Web site of Bram Cohen, the software’s creator.
Mr. Cohen says he wrote the short polemic in 1999, two years before he started designing BitTorrent. And since releasing the software, he has repeatedly argued that it is meant for legal file swapping, not piracy. But some lawyers say that the memo could damage Mr. Cohen’s credibility when he claims that BitTorrent, unlike Grokster and Morpheus, does not endorse copyright infringement. (Wired News)
For more on the implications of the Supreme Court’s decision in MGM v. Grokster, see an article from The Chronicle by Andrea L. Foster.
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