More comments on developments in BitTorrent are in Wired. Professor Mark Lemley's comments on the legality issues are particularly interesting.

See also the comments at techdirt. (Link from Batelle Media.)

My own view is that, in the long run, content owners must be allowed substantial rights of self-help to interfere with pirated content moving across the Internet. When Representative Harold Berman raised this idea a couple of years ago it aroused a storm, and at the moment it is not a topic of respectable discussion.

Luckily, respectability is not highly-valued here at PFF, so I can think about it. The alternatives are to impose heavy policing burdens on ISPs and communications companies. Or, we could let our system of market-based IP collapse in a heap of rubble, and turn the whole thing into a government-run socialized system. The first option would be complicated and would certainly provoke the squawks of the burdened. The second is truly unthinkable; creative endeavor would become a hybrid of the European health care system and Mexico's Pemex, with the U.S. Universal Service Program mixed in.

So self help it will be.

posted by James DeLong @ 12:55 PM | Internet: P2P, Search Engines...

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