Patent Office on "Inadvertent" Filesharing
The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office has released a report titled Filesharing Programs and “Technological Features to Induce Users to Share” [PDF]. The report determines that the makers of five popular filesharing programs “repeatedly deployed features that had a known propensity to trick users into uploading infringing files inadvertently,” and goes on to conclude that “such features justify further investigation to determine whether particular distributors intended for such features to act as duping schemes.”
Reported by InformationWeek, Techdirt, ars technica, and many others. Copies of the report are also at Shadowmonkey.