RE: [dvd-discuss] Movie Downloads, automatically illegal?

[Richard Hartman <hartman(at)onetouch.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tim Neu [mailto:tim@tneu.visi.com]
> Sent: Monday, August 05, 2002 12:31 PM
> To: 'dvd-discuss@eon.law.harvard.edu'
> Subject: RE: [dvd-discuss] Movie Downloads, automatically illegal?
> 
> 
> On Mon, 5 Aug 2002, Richard Hartman wrote:
> 
> > The downloads _aren't_ legal unless the distributor
> > has the right to distribute, which they don't.  You're
> > still too focussed on the end result and not the process.
> 
> Not to nitpick, but if I connect to my Gnutilla server at 
> home to download
> a song so I can play it at work, that would be a legal 
> download even by
> the strictest argument proposed here.  I don't need the right to
> distribute, cause it's my song from my CD.
> 
> The court might weigh the intententions of someone using gnutilla for
> this purpose vs something with authentication differently, but that
> wouldn't affect the legality of that particular download.

I'm pretty certain that the intent would be determined by
how you set up the file for foreign access.  That is, if you
put it on an FTP server w/ account & password access then you
might be kosher, but if the "guest" account could get at it
then your intent would be judged to be "open distribution".
If you set it up on gnutilla (not familiar with that, but I
_think_ it's an open peer-to-peer file-sharing system similar
to Napster) then you probably would be up a creek.



-- 
-Richard M. Hartman
hartman@onetouch.com

186,000 mi./sec ... not just a good idea, it's the LAW!