My political blog, outragedmoderates.org, uses P2P to share government documents, and was cited by amicus briefs submitted to the Supreme Court by the ACLU and the Free Software Foundation in reference to the MGM v. Grokster case. If the Court follows the 1984 Betamax decision, Grokster could hinge on whether the Court finds that P2P technology has substantial, or at least potentially substantial, noninfringing uses. The ACLU brief cites outragedmoderates.org's use of P2P as an example of how people can use the technology to spread political speech and government information, which is the kind of thing the Court would probably consider to be a substantial noninfringing use.
As a result of the amicus briefs, people from a number of federal agency domains, including USDOJ.gov and USCOURTS.gov, have been visiting my blog this week. To show them how P2P applications like BitTorrent can move large amounts of information, I am keeping a running tally on the site of the number of pages of government documents downloaded from me. As of today, over 765,000 pages of documents have been downloaded since mid-February.
Obviously, I don't know if anyone in DC is actually taking my site seriously, but in the very least, they've been checking it out. So if you're concerned with the chilling effect that a ruling against Grokster could have on technological innovation, and have been wishing there was some small way you could show your support, please consider downloading a BitTorrent file or two.
Here are three torrents I put together containing legal information pertaining to the Grokster and Betamax cases. The Grokster briefs torrent has been downloaded 281 times so far (totalling 626,000 pages of documents), thanks to links from BoingBoing and Lawrence Lessig.
Grokster briefs (20.7 MB - all 74 of the briefs submitted to the Supreme Court re: MGM v. Grokster)
Betamax Legal Documents (4.7 MB - 41 legal documents and briefs from the Supreme Court's 1984 Betamax decision from the Electronic Frontier Foundation)
Betamax Oral Arguments - (52.7 MB - 2 mp3s of the oral arguments in the Supreme Court's 1984 Betamax decision from the Electronic Frontier Foundation)
Article comments
1 - Temple Stark
I don't think you've adequately explained how the fact that these you have thousands of public government documents is related to the P2P technology.
Are you saying the goverment is interested in your site because you have government documents?
Or Are yo usayng the government is interested in your site because you use P2P technology?
And if you are inclined to say both, well, what which one do you think they are REALLY interested in?
2 - jadester
I believe thad is making the point that he demonstrating a good, non-copyright-infringing use of P2P technology. Even further than that, it could be said that this use of P2P is a public service. It's a way of getting publicly-available government documents to a wider audience more easily than usual. Well, more easily for those of use who have no problem using P2P programs.
These documents may well already be available from government websites, but often important documents are hidden away and difficult to get to. Even if they're not intentionally-hidden, it can take a bit of searching through ireelevant stuff to find what you're after. This use of P2P offers a different way of finding what you're after, that some of us will probably find easier.
His site is mentioned in the Grokster case at least in part because there just aren't that many sites out there really pushing a legitimate use of P2P software (not that this means such uses aren't possible or even wanted)
3 - Temple Stark
Well I would say that the Justice Department or any music publisher isn't worried about P2P of non-copyright materials.
4 - Thad Anderson
Jadester explains it better than I did. I don't even have any "breaking" documents, the way that legal groups like the ACLU, National Security Archive, or Judicial Watch, or sites like Memory Hole, do. And mine is not the only noninfringing use of P2P technology (see etree.org, prodigem.com, etc).
But the combination of the two, a political use of P2P technology, is what is getting some attention. This something that is easy for legal people/judges to understand, and the Court tends to favor old-fashioned political speech over other forms of speech (admittedly, this is a huge generalization based on 1st Amendment cases I've read). They can wrap their heads around something like this much better than a uselike programmers using P2P to share software application projects they are working on. So I'm trying to get my download numbers as high as possible.
5 - Victor Plenty
Legal uses of software to share public domain materials would become impossible, or at least illegal, if the entertainment industry succeeds in its goal. They seek to persuade the courts to believe nobody ever uses file sharing for anything other than infringing copyrights (or "stealing" music and movies, as the RIAA and MPAA would like to brainwash us into phrasing it).
As a use of file sharing software which does not infringe any copyrights, Thad's project is quite useful for disproving the entertainment industry's claims. Hopefully it will help the courts rule against restricting the technology, as they did in the landmark Betamax case.
If the courts buy the industry's line, I predict we will not be all that many years away from paying royalties and fines whenever annoying pop songs get stuck in our heads.
6 - Eric Olsen
super stuff Thad, putting your money where your blog is, so to speak. thanks!
7 - Thad Anderson
Can't believe I didn't know this was out until now . . . transcript of the Grokster oral arguments from the Cal-Berkeley website:
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/academics/courses/is296a-2/s05/pdf/GroksterOA.pdf
(from BoingBoing: http://www.boingboing.net/2005/04/06/grokster_transcript_.html)
8 - Thad Anderson
Dubya's "iPod One" - and it has some Creedence and other decent stuff on it.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/Music/04/12/bush.ipod/index.html