Roman Shaposhnik's

Indirection is a wonderful thing. It is said that there is no problem in computer science that cannot be solved by adding an extra level of it. It is even more exciting when it gets applied to our societal common sense. For example, we all know that selling stolen goods is, in itself, illegal. But what about renting property for vendors selling all sorts of goods (some stolen and some not)? Or what about promoting such "fairs"? Is it legal, is it not? I'm not a lawyer but I know for a fact that when goods themselves are virtual the situation gets even more complicated.

In the business of media distribution there is probably no issue hotter than the legality of P2P downloads, trackers and networks. I do have my own take on all of it, as I am sure do guys at a very special Movie Database. But lets not get into this discussion right now. Lets apply indirection. Pretend that all content traveling through the P2P filesharing networks is illegal. I know that for any reasonable human being this should be as hard to imagine as the world where all software is commercial, but we will try very hard. Ok. Now, the next question is: to what extent secondary information derived from such a content would be legal? Well, that's a difficult question and precisely the one that 0xdb.org is trying to explore. I wish them luck!