Word: copyright
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...more illegal than the Windows "copy file" function. Beneficial, content-neutral technologies can easily be hijacked by pirates who find them useful, but they should not be banned for that reason alone. Otherwise, VCR's and tape decks would have been banned long ago for contributing to copyright infringement--as they almost were until the Supreme Court stepped in. Even if their manufacturers knew what the devices would be used for, the capability of non-infringing use is stillkey. After all, in the electronic world, a test of intent becomes meaningless; the encryption program written to protect human rights activists...
...imposing these costs, both the trial court and the Ninth Circuit neglected to address what was Napster's most serious argument--that publishing a directory is a protected act of speech. Copyright laws and the First Amendment often seem to conflict--publishing a book or recording a song are expressive acts --but their conflicts are normally addressed by "fair use" exemptions, which allow for portions of copyrighted works to be quoted or commented on. Downloading copyrighted music is not fair use, and so the Napster courts saw no need to address Napster's other First Amendment concerns...
...category of fair use does not take care of the conflicts between free speech and contributory copyright infringement, which the Supreme Court has never addressed in a non-commercial environment. OpenNap isn't engaged in any commercial activity: it merely reports on the status of connected servers. If a newspaper reported that "A large pile of CD's ready for copying have been sighted on a park bench on 53rd St.," no one would dream of taking them to court--but if it wrote that "The file foo.txt can be found on a server at 140.247.83.245," this might constitute contributory...
...ignoring the protections granted to speech, the Ninth Circuit created a dangerous gray area for new Internet protocols. How useful must a piece of information be before it becomes illegal? How effective must a search tool be before it becomes contributory infringement? If I duplicate copyrighted text on my website, could Google be sued for indexing it--or, God forbid, for keeping a cached copy on its own servers? There is no room for gray areas in this body of law. Either an act is contributory infringement or it isn't, and the failure to draw clear lines creates chilling...
ISPs are already required to respond to requests to remove copyrighted materials--so copyright authors already have a remedy. Burdening search engines and other indexing services with a responsibility to filter their results through an RIAA-approved list would only slow their searches and dragoon their employees into the service of the copyright industry...