France’s counterpart to RIAA has been given a green light to sue four U.S. companies that develop peer-to-peer file-sharing applications. The applications make possible both lawful and unlawful methods of sharing copyrighted or uncopyrighted material. (“Record Labels to Sue Vuze, Limewire and SourceForge”, TorrentFreak, Nov. 14).
3 Comments
It’s strange, and spooky, that Sourceforge is being sued too. Go check out their site; all they do is provide web space for others’ arbitrary projects. I guess they contributed to contributing to copyright infringement.
Hosting free software is not especially lucrative. I doubt Sourceforge can afford to mount a major defense.
Im sure they can, Sourceforge owns Slashdot, Thinkgeek, Freshmeat, and Linux.com.
And they appear to be making a decent amount of money doing it.
http://ir.corp.sourceforge.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=82629&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1230194
Not to mention that the EFF would likely jump to aid Sourceforge against this kind of suit. And if all the people that use Sourceforge (and their associated sites) regularly throw a dollar in the pot…
It is still odd to see Sourceforge mentioned as a developer, though. I’d like to see some sanity come out this suit, but I’m nor very optimistic.