April 30, 2003
Trespassing on P2P Networks?
Denise Howell makes a really interesting point about flooding P2P networks with bogus files:
“All of which is an admittedly roundabout (but hopefully useful) way of getting to the point: I’m surprised—and particularly in light of yesterday’s district court decision—I haven’t yet heard of a P2P network asserting trespass to chattels, nuisance or tortious interference as potential bases for barring the introduction of bogus files intended to meddle with the system and frustrate users. Standing would perhaps be an issue, since files being shared do not reside on network servers but rather on users’ computers, but it would seem pretty self-evident that those planting fake files seek deliberately to undermine the economics of the network.”
Now, I’ve got no clue about any of these legal doctrines – except for the fact that trespass to chattels is being used in the America Airlines website scraping case. They probably wouldn’t apply to the recent spamming of KaZaA/Grokster users. (Someone on Politech asks whether it even constitutes spamming.)
Update: Dan Gillmor points out that maybe these spammings did constitute a misuse of KaZaA’s service.
Filed by Derek Slater at 12:13 pm under General news
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