Can we (legally) include Bittorrent on the OSD?

Given that there are a lot of non-infringing uses and the fact that the studios have even made some deals with Bittorrent, you might think it would be safe to include a Bittorrent client, but apparently that's not necessarily the case according to Ed Felten and Fred von Lohman:

http://www.scotusblog.com/discussion/archives/grokster/index.html

This is unfortunate because Bittorrent is the right tool to use for a number of things, from sending out updates to distributing legitimate video, ufortunately, it probably gets us into some legal gray area that could be expensive to explore.

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Borland usese BitTorrent

Borland distributes its software toolsets using BitTorrent. Its a useful way to distribute large files, that's all. The fact that a movie is a large data file is just coincidence.

Movie piracy is much overrated; I will only download clips I need for reference (work/study) and material that's hard to get (again, usually for work/study) but for general entertainment its much more convenient to just rent the material for the short time that you need it. I suspect that's what many others do. I'm certainly not going to sit on the net downloading gigabyte upon gigabyte of material that I'll probably never watch.

(I've noticed that complaints about piracy seem to go hand in hand with a much hyped movie that bombs; it never seems to occur to them that the reason why the movie bombed was because it just a bad movie that nobody wanted to watch.)

Blizzard's World of Warcraft

Blizzard's World of Warcraft downloader is bittorent based and this is a trend many new distributers are moving towards - I don't see how it could possibly be a legal problem.

You might...

...consider getting a more up-to-date opinion. Just email them.

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