# P2P the New Hardware Buzzword.



## RootbeaR (Dec 9, 2006)

"For the moment, P2P users must get used to the idea that just like in the early eighties, prior to the Sony Betamax decision, *everyone that owned a VCR was a criminal*.
In 1984, after seven years of litigation, the Supreme Court largely upheld the lower court's initial ruling. *In the most far-reaching portion of that decision, that court said flatly that a product is not liable for contributory infringement if it is also used for legitimate purposes. "Indeed, it need merely be capable of substantial noninfringing uses," the court wrote.* 
The court also held that home recording, at least for the noncommercial use of "time shifting," was not infringement.

Those last two sentences become rather important when compared to P2P software. With the BBC's iPlayer, TVUplayer (30,000 users to 400,000 users in 5 months) and number of smaller but legal implementations and uses of P2P software (e.g.: CNN news broadcasts), the numbers of P2P users are swelling. Consequently it is becoming difficult for statisticians to differerentiate between legal file sharing and unapproved file sharing."
http://www.perceptric.com/blog/_archives/2009/4/1/4139270.html


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