After napster now also Gnutella is under legal pressure. Not from the music industry but from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). They have sent hundreds of letters to major Internet service providers and universities, telling them users on their networks are violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by trading copyrighted movies through Gnutella.
Some of the universities that have been targeted in the MPAA's investigation include Harvard University and the University of Connecticut. Meanwhile, ISP Excite@Home has sent out about 20 e-mails and letters over the past four days telling Gnutella users their services will be terminated within 24 hours if their alleged movie sharing continues. |
The MPAA already has aggressively--and successfully--sued several companies, accusing them of aiding copyright infringement by allowing people to record and trade copyrighted content. They include Scour, iCraveTV.com and RecordTV.com. But until now, Gnutella systems have flown below the legal radar screen of many copyright holders, partly because it's so difficult to track infringement on systems that lack central servers.
You all know that unlike systems as Napster or Scour, Gnutella does not provide a central server. Instead, the Gnutella systems pass along files through a giant chain of individual computers. This means they are hard to get. U cannot sue Gnuttela for this, so they have to rely on ISPs to help.
The swapping of movies isn't nearly as widespread as music trading because films use so much bandwidth and can take hours to download. But this is changing since more and more people get faster connections.
We reported earlier that the RIAA (body of the music industry) is not yet seeing gnutella as a thread because it is difficult to use and it's networks are not as reliable as napster's. But now the movie industry is after them. It was just a matter of time before every p2p program is threat with legal action...
Source: ZDNet
