Bittorrent Next RIAA Target After Grokster and P2P
US based Organizations like RIAA and MPAA are quite ecstatic about the victory in the supreme court in the case between MGM and Grokster. The courts ruled that the companies developing the p2p applications can be sued for the actions taken by their users provided the application has been developed and promoted to be used for illegal content sharing.
Market analysts now fear that these companies might target Bittorrent technology and their application developers for similar suits as they are also used on a mass level for exchanging digital content. This protocol was developed by Barm Cohen and is a file-sharing program that distributes large files quickly by breaking them into many pieces, sharing the pieces among a large number of users, and reassembling them upon delivery. It even inspired Microsoft to come up with their own version in Microsoft Avalanche.
MPAA and RIAA already have succeeded in getting some of the most popular Bittorrent hosting websites on the Internet closed down accusing them of making available pirated content on the internet. And they might consider taking the legal route as well. However, experts say that Bittorrent is expected to fair better in legal battles if such a situation arises.
Mark Schultz, an associate law professor at Southern Illinois University said in a statement: “Bittorrent has a more realistic case for non-infringing users than Grokster or the others ever had. (The developer) didn’t set out to trade Ammonium or Britney Spears. But we have to be realistic because we know it’s used for massive illegal file sharing.”
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Sushubh Mittal is the tech columnist at Search Engine Journal and Editor of TechWhack
