In a time when David v Goliath seems to only be racking points up for the bullying giants, David has finally scored a point that gives us hope that justice will eventually begin to prevail. Not only did the Icelandic court dismiss the case of SMAIS v Istorrent ehf, but the plaintiff was actually ordered to pay the court costs for the defendant.

    It is always important to make clear, piracy is illegal. However, it is also important to point out that in almost every instance, copyright holders and their representatives go after the torrent and P2P networking sites rather than those breaking laws themselves. While these sites are used in large part for the trading of illegal or pirated digital goods, they also help to distribute movies through software like Azureus, who is no suing cable companies who break up torrents as it is interrupting their business which is 100% legitimate. Cross your fingers on that one too.

    This is a tactic by companies like SMAIS, MPAA and RIAA to cut the problem off where it starts, sometimes through using bullying tactics like they did with torrentspy.com, suing them into submission until...

    their resources were exhausted and they could no longer fight. The problem with that is that the technology is not to blame, the people who abuse it are. It's funny how many people have tried to sue gun makers unsuccessfully, yet when a powerhouse with financial resources sues a tech company for a technology that is perhaps more useful in practical application than many technologies that have come about in the IT era, judges seem to be sorely lacking in being unbiased and actually paying attention to how weak the evidence against them always is, if there is any at all.

    This time, the good guys (or at least the right guys) won. For how long is anybody's guess, since the case will most likely be appealed to a higher court. It is a victory felt around the world by technology companies who develop and deploy P2P applications, and we hope they can hang on to that. It sets a good precedent in saying “we have broken no laws, and you're not suing us for anything, be it action or money.” This would greatly dissuade future lawsuits as well as opening up the doors for more development in the areas of file sharing and data distribution technologies.

    The owner of Istorrent efh, Svavar Lúthersson told torrentfreak.com “...it came as a surprise for both myself and the plaintiff.” He says he will have to consult with his lawyer as an injunction still stands and probably will until the case is appealed. Hopefully it will be thrown out there too.

    For those who don't know, torrent searches search only for torrents. A torrent is NOT copyrighted material, but is metadata – that is – a file which describes something. There is nothing illegal contained within it, nor is the distribution of it in violation of laws in most any country around the world. So we're clear, file sharing and distribution technology is very useful for all sorts of purposes in business. Any company with large amounts of documentation can use it to distribute them with less load on their systems. A huge impact it could (and sometimes does) have is the availability for smaller software developers to get out versions of free and trial software. While it may be cheap to host software, it may not be cheap to distribute it. For this reason, if someone looked up “antivirus” on a torrent search, they may be able to pull up a free or trial antivirus review which I'm pretty sure would be useful for a lot of you windows users.

    There are tons of other things. Some people looking for something that may be totally free and/or open source may have a hard time sifting through all of the articles and sites online to find it, whereas they can find it from many users via torrents. Linux distributions can be downloaded without as much strain on the networks of companies that produce it, as well as companies who release regular software updates with a large user base, like malware removal companies. When one person can download this file from say, 15 other users without ever having to download from the one server the company has online, everybody wins.

    For now, it is a small but significant victory. Keep your fingers crossed, and hope that judges tell the representatives of companies like SMAIS, RIAA and the MPAA to stick to prosecuting people who actually do something wrong and not law abiding businesses and people.

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