A Moral Dilemma: Open letter to Gnutella community

[Ahri]

You agree? You must not have been referring to the legal actions you talked about in your letter. Seems like you were in favour of that. These solutions will hurt your cause, not help it. Napster again provides an example. The lawsuit increased awareness and popularity of the program. It caused an exponential amount of growth in the number of users. Before they were taken to court, very few people knew it existed. When they found out, people rushed to get in on free music. You have the same problem with children and Gnutella. Most kids don't know they can get pornography off the internet, never mind Gnutella. By percentage, few kids use the internet for pornography. Taking people to court over Gnutella and publicizing its existence will influence many more kids to use it, many more then your filter will ever stop. What's better, 50% of 100 kids getting pornography, or 100% of 10?

Your filter has one major problem, and this is why you are getting no support from the Gnutella community. It gives people the option to stop their software from routing descriptors. This causes a disruption in the network and provides absolutely nothing to users of the filter. I strongly urge you to remove that feature from your program. If your software in anyway disrupts the health of Gnutella, such that it is hurting non-users of your filter, you can expect anti-filter software. Think about a free filter remover on the home page of all Guntella clients. If kids can install a Gnutella client, I'm sure they can install a filter remover.

Your company and its supporters seem to oppose legal pornography on the Internet. I say, if its okay in magazines, its okay for the Internet.