Substantial Non-Infringing Use

Posted on August 7, 2004 by Tim Wu

P2PCongress‘ plan to provide access to easy P2P distributed archives of Congressional hearings is both useful and a killer example of non-infringing use. Others?

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13 Responses to Substantial Non-Infringing Use

  1. Branko Collin says:
    August 7, 2004 at 1:47 pm

    Project Gutenberg offers a way to find its ebooks through something called Magneticlink.org. I haven’t tried it myself. http://www.gutenberg.net/howto/p2p-howto

    CDs and DVDs can be downloaded through http://www.gutenberg.net/cdproject/ using BitTorrent.

  2. Seth Finkelstein says:
    August 7, 2004 at 2:44 pm

    Folks, we have got to grapple with the problem that trivial answers aren’t going to work. Any system can be used to distribute public-domain documents. Frankly, the idea that there is significance in distributing archives of Congressional hearings via P2P systems is exactly the sort of answer that we think is a cool gotcha, and they’ll think is a laughable argument. You could put the Congressional Record on a warez site too.

  3. Firas says:
    August 7, 2004 at 5:14 pm

    Seth: indeed you can put the congressional record on a warez site–but the technology underlying many warez operations (tcp/ip, ftp, http, html) has quite clearly been shown to have noninfringing use. Nobody’s damning the ‘regular’ internet.

    P2P is still mostly conflated with piracy.

  4. Seth Finkelstein says:
    August 7, 2004 at 7:14 pm

    Firas: “P2P is still mostly conflated with piracy.” – Exactly! And my point is that the people who believe that conflation, won’t be convinced by trivial arguments that “It *COULD* be used for this material” – just like a warez site won’t get away with saying “Look, we’re using our distribution facilities for the Congressional Record too”.

    The different is that the basic technologies of the Internet have established real uses, not uses that look like excuses. My point then is that this looks like an excuse, not a killer argument.

    I think it’s clear that we need to address this, given the discussion of the INDUCE Act.

  5. Alexander Wehr says:
    August 7, 2004 at 7:38 pm

    I would like to know why nobody has put out any reports on how cable companies and the MPAA have conspired to rob digital cable and satellite customers of their home recording rights via requirements that all “digital cable ready” devices include point of delivery encryption which can only be broken by technology which they refuse to license to devices unless they are “unidirectional” (no pc’s) or force you to record in mandatory DRM’ed formats(no linux).

  6. Branko Collin says:
    August 8, 2004 at 2:50 am

    Seth, the only answers that can work are trivial. The problem so far seems to have been that politicians and judges are capable of understanding the possibility of non-infringing use, but are still willing to undersign rulings and laws that outlaw P2P-technology because they don’t think theoretic non-infringing use is enough of an argument.

    The point is not that public domain books can be transported over P2P networks, the point is that Project Gutenberg (an actual organisation, run by actual US citizens) is actually going through the trouble to tell you how to fetch a public domain book using P2P. Somebody sat down and invested time and energy to do so.

    Now the reason that PG does this may be because they believe in the usefulness of P2P, because it relieves them of hosting the works and paying bandwidth, or because they believe in the ’cause’ of P2P. Either way, it is dear to them (us) to the point that they invest time and energy; and it is non-infringing.

    The underlying question is (I believe), and something more or less discussed in Free Culture (IIRC), is whether politicians and judges believe geeks are second rate citizens. Are the things that geeks like to do less important than the things politicians and judges like to do?

    The killer app you are looking for lies beyond the world of geeks. But because of that, it does not exist on the P2P networks. Even where the real world seeps into the P2P networks (music, books) it tends to get tainted with the hacker bad name. Music is something you listen to from a CD, a book is a physical object. To some policy makers, anything digital may simply be suspect.

    I believe Larry and Tim are right: we need to bring the subject as close to policy makers as possible. Don’t say Project Gutenberg if you believe that name is too tainted: say Alice in Wonderland. Don’t say “read on my PDA”, if you believe that phrase is too suspect: say “only way for the blind” (or say, like David Rothman does: “won’t anybody think of the children?”).

    If you do anything, don’t say “trivial answers aren�t going to work”. I am not interested in what doesn’t work. Tell us what will work. I cannot read your mind. Are you looking for a use that is unique to P2P?

  7. Seth Finkelstein says:
    August 8, 2004 at 9:20 am

    BitTorrent Linux distributions are one nontrivial example I know. I think things like that, work. It’s not “unique to P2P”. But it’s real – in the sense that it’s used by people for a natural and “honest” application.

  8. Karen Coyle says:
    August 8, 2004 at 1:18 pm

    Seth, the problem with BitTorrent is that the intersection of the set of judges with the set of BitTorrent users is a null set. The Congressional Record is at least something judges might have used. Geekware just doesn’t play well in court. That said, I agree that this is hardly the killer app, not because it isn’t a legitimate use but because its overall impact is low. I could use my earlier statement and say that the intersection of the set of p2p users and users of the Congressional Record may not be null but it will be small enough to have little effect on any real use of the CR.

  9. Alexander Wehr says:
    August 8, 2004 at 1:28 pm

    so you honestly think it’s “jocks v geeks” out there?

    geeks are the ones making all the defense department’s toys… i would be very surprised if these people actually ignored the needs of geeks.

  10. Alexander Wehr says:
    August 8, 2004 at 1:32 pm

    The real problem is we have 1950’s menality in the twenty first century economy. They don’t comprehend that an essentially free operating system is viable. They are trapped in an “everything free is not viable” or “anything useful but not paid for must be stolen” menality.

  11. Branko Collin says:
    August 10, 2004 at 12:31 pm

    Here’s a thoroughly weird example: http://sp2torrent.com

    This is a site that distributes Microsoft Windows XP Service Packs. You probably need these things to keep your Windows somewhat safe and up-to-date, yet (apparently) even Microsoft is limiting their downloads, because they are too large.

    So another party set up a website that offers the SPs as a BitTorrent download (my guess without the express permission of the copyright holder).

  12. Branko Collin says:
    August 10, 2004 at 12:40 pm

    BTW, I should probably mention that that site seems specifically set up to show potential substantial non-infringing use. (I suddenly feel like Mary Poppins after typing that.)

  13. xzilla says:
    August 13, 2004 at 9:03 pm

    Many open source projects use p2p to distrbute thier software, so that is certainly one example. The other one that I think would be closer to home for congress is an idea to put all of the sessions of congress on video on a p2p system. After all, cspan is a great window into our government, but we all have lives and so we can not watch it 24/7. This is where p2p comes in. Missed an important speech on a topic important to you? What if you could download it on demand when you had the time? Regular on-demand http/ftp type solution cannot solve this problem, since the video files are too large, but a p2p system certainly could, especially with major univeristies hosting content (and certainly some would, any school big on poly-sci would probably want to give access to its students). Personally I would like to see other content put into this type of system, for example presidential speeches, or testimony from the 9/11 commission, or even speeches from the political party conventions. I missed several speeches from the DNC that I would like to see (Kerry, Obama) and right now I don’t see any way to get at that content. Imagine what p2p could do to address this.

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