I think that jimmyhyatt has missed a main point and that is LW, as an application, is perfectly legal to buy/download and use.

The illegality comes in if you use it to download and redistribute copyright material without any recompense to the copyright owners.

I believe the point Peerless is making is that Napster could, by using it’s administrative control over it’s central server, stop it’s users from distributing copyright material. It did not do that so it was legally clobbered.

LW, because of the nature of P2P, has no control over what you or I do with our PCs, i.e. what products we have and share, so LW, as a company, cannot be held liable for the use we put their product to. In other words, P2P is about communication and sharing if P2P users then abuse this great tool then we have no one to blame but ourselves when the wolves come knocking.

On a more practical level, if by some means the LW software was no longer being developed users of existing installed LW and other Gnutella apps would still have a non-centralised network to use.




UK Bob