Apollon soon in kde-extragear

[Petter E. Stokke]

On Tuesday 10 February 2004 23:34, Martin Köbele wrote:
> > KMLDonkey has no P2P code
> Apollon has no p2p-code.

So where, exactly, do the legal concerns arise from? Claiming that said 
frontends "assist" illegal P2P activities is just too specious. There's 
not a single byte of code in either that even pretends to participate in a 
P2P network.

Let me rephrase that to remove any doubt about my point: Neither of these 
applications are, in fact, P2P applications.

Both are, of course, quite useless without the presence, somewhere, of a 
P2P application, but (and this may well come as a surprise to some) P2P is 
not a synonym for illegal. Neither is MP3, in fact, despite what certain 
music industry interest groups would have you think. Even if 90% of MP3s 
are illegally obtained copies of copyrighted material (and that number 
isn't unreasonably incorrect, I'll wager), MP3 technology is not illegal. 
The same holds true for P2P.

Then again, in case you've forgotten already, _these are not P2P 
applications_. Not the slightest bit. It doesn't matter, legally, if 
KMLDonkey (or, indeed, Apollon) has increased the productivity of your 
illegal downloading a hundredfold - it _is not the facilitator_. That's an 
application called mldonkey. Now, if the mldonkey developers come around 
asking to be hosted in extragear, let's talk again (and I'll bet you I can 
argue convincingly in their favour about the Betamax defense). Until then, 
there really is no legal concern that any sane court wouldn't laugh at. 
Even if IANAL, I can tell you that much.

-- 
Petter E. Stokke <gibreel at project23.no> http://www.gibreel.net/
PGP key: http://www.gibreel.net/key.asc
Fingerprint: 4FF3 12BD 692A 0FFF 984F  78DA 4776 81FB 1906 3A9F
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