I'm not sure about the US, but in the EU and in particular in my country of France, anti-piracy lawsuits have seen a very clearly drawn line between a mere downloader, and an uploader. That's what lead emule and bittorrent to be "dangerous" legally while direct downloading (newsgroup, rapidshare, ...) and streaming almost never led to conviction (even symbolic). That the user didn't realize his bittorrent was re-uploading content to others didn't matter.
So, if I visit a website to get, say, direct copyrighted content (let's say photo, comics, music, whatever) and that website uses webrtc to make me reshare it to other users, my legal status just went from a almost never convicted downloader to a very much punished (even though it stayed symbolic, it was still a legal loss) uploader.
What's different in the CDN use-case is that the content that reached a 3rd user through the uploading user would've reached the 3rd anyway, just from the original server.
Yeah but from the point of view of the (unexpecting) uploader that doesn't change anything. If user A wasn't uploading, user B would still get the files from other peers on the torrent, doesn't change the fact A was sharing and actively uploading the file.
Not trying to throw a wrench in your game, but I think this is something you guys need to have a look into because you're turning unsuspecting users into uploaders of content they have no control over, without noticing it, when it has been proven to cause them legal harm.
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I'm not sure about the US, but in the EU and in particular in my country of France, anti-piracy lawsuits have seen a very clearly drawn line between a mere downloader, and an uploader. That's what lead emule and bittorrent to be "dangerous" legally while direct downloading (newsgroup, rapidshare, ...) and streaming almost never led to conviction (even symbolic). That the user didn't realize his bittorrent was re-uploading content to others didn't matter.
So, if I visit a website to get, say, direct copyrighted content (let's say photo, comics, music, whatever) and that website uses webrtc to make me reshare it to other users, my legal status just went from a almost never convicted downloader to a very much punished (even though it stayed symbolic, it was still a legal loss) uploader.
What's different in the CDN use-case is that the content that reached a 3rd user through the uploading user would've reached the 3rd anyway, just from the original server.
Yeah but from the point of view of the (unexpecting) uploader that doesn't change anything. If user A wasn't uploading, user B would still get the files from other peers on the torrent, doesn't change the fact A was sharing and actively uploading the file.
Not trying to throw a wrench in your game, but I think this is something you guys need to have a look into because you're turning unsuspecting users into uploaders of content they have no control over, without noticing it, when it has been proven to cause them legal harm.
We're definitely looking into that, AFAIK for now, is that as long as the content is legal there's no problem with uploading it.