Word: wirehog
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Dates: during 2004-2004
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Reader’s of last Monday’s Crimson were met with something of a confusing mixed message. A front page story advertised the debut of Wirehog—the latest from thefacebook.com creator Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06-’07. Wirehog is a peer-to-peer file sharing tool that interfaces with thefacebook and allows its users to swap content—regardless of its copyright status—with friends at Harvard, and Stanford for the moment, and what will surely in short order be a wide network of colleges and universities...
It’s important as a first observation to note that Wirehog itself, like most such applications, is probably not an illegal piece of software. The basic standard for legality amongst peer-to-peer file sharing clients, according to the courts, has been that the software has “substantial non-infringing uses,” and wirehog.com proudly proclaims that you can use the software to “share pictures and other media with friends.” Pictures, presuming you took them yourself, are probably fine. “Other media” are what...
...fair, Wirehog is not the only game in town for illegally trading music and movies. There are the old classics like KaZaA, and then there are newer entrants into the playing field, such as bittorrent—which, certain studies have suggested, may currently be responsible for something like 30 percent of all traffic on the Internet...
...last year when iTunes first appeared, there’s no real reason to believe that using Apple’s ubiquitous music playing software to share music over a college dormitory network is legal. The fair use doctrine that might be used to determine whether copies made with Wirehog are okay doesn’t apply here at all, because iTunes streams music rather than creating reproductions, and it seems pretty likely the law would consider making songs available in this way to be a “public performance,” a right reserved for the holder...
...think it’s unlikely will get us into trouble. I would argue that as long as finding KaZaA users to sue remains as easy as shooting fish in a barrel, industry executives will probably not turn their efforts towards cracking down on college iTunes users or even Wirehog, unless they feel they can sue Apple or Mark Zuckerberg and get the software itself removed from the market...