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by rglullis 2050 days ago
Sorry, your whole argument smells of FUD.

> One difference is that blank CDs cost money.

So does internet access, electricity to run the servers, disks to store the data. Your point?

> Copyright holders could potentially get future development shut down on the basis that the service implicitly authorises or encourages copyright infringement, as they are trying to do to youtube-dl.

Bullshit. The same argument could be made against a web browser. It's not just because RIAA is making some absurd claim that is yet to be dropped in court that their claims are valid.

Also, even if the RIAA managed to block access to a central point of development, it would be at most a nuisance. Developers of whatever project gets blocked from Github need to do nothing youtube-dl

> this strategy has worked for some tools like Napster, KaZaA, and some BitTorrent trackers. while failing for BitTorrent clients.

Very easy to see how the strategy only works against corporations, not against open source projects. KaZaA got sued, but GnuTella lives on.

1 comments

My point is that the courts decide what constitutes “fair use,” and based on past decisions, I don’t think they would agree that using Funkwhale to share 10,000 tracks with 10 friends counts. Until a court says otherwise, it’s not FUD, bullshit or absurd to point out that these tools exist in a legal grey area.
And my point is that claiming it to be in a "legal grey area" is the absurd part. Funkwhale is as much of a legal grey area as a web browser and a web server.