On Tue, Apr 24, 2007 at 10:17:22AM +0100, Dima Barsky wrote: > I'm not a lawyer either, but if we start talking about contributory > infringement, shouldn't we remove all P2P clients from Debian as well? > There is a much stronger case for contributory infringement there..
I'm not convinced. Significant legal use for P2P exists.
To clarify what I think about the ToS of a service like eBay, I think
it's fundamentally different from something that tries to dictate how
you may use static pages. It's a service, it doesn't make sense to say
that eBay was published at some point in the time. And I'm not sure
what else would give you the right to use the service than a contract.
You contract them to auction your stuff, or (less clearly) to
participate in an auction. It's more like software and less like
something that's published.
If (and that's a big if) that argumentation is valid, indeed there is
no legal use for the software, and I think that probably would weigh
quite a bit in court. Though I admit I don't even know if there's such
a thing as contributory infringement of a contract, it sounds somehow
weird.
OTOH I don't think the attitude that "if it's a web form, I can
legally enter anything into it" works very well either. I think it's
somewhat analogous to having your car painted and then refusing to pay
because "I was just babbling" (and please don't take this to imply
that anyone in this list would have said something like that).
Sami
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