14 DAY TRIAL // A number of recording artists, led by eccentric billionaire Alki David, have filed a second lawsuit against CNET and CBS Interactive. The plaintiffs hope to convince a court to block the company from distributing BitTorrent applications via its download website, Download.com.
The complaint, provided by TechDirt, alleges that CBS and CNET have not only facilitated the downloading of 65 million copies of BitTorrent applications, but they’ve also promoted piracy through some of the news articles they’ve published.
“Bittorrent is a clear and present danger to copyrighted works. From evidence readily available in CNET’s own ‘news’ articles, it is clear that bittorrent applications like uTorrent are growing explosively to fill the infringement vacuum left by Gnutella applications,” the complaint reads.
Although the plaintiff’s arguments have a lot of faults, mainly because the BitTorrent protocol isn’t necessarily utilized for illegal purposes, this could set a dangerous precedent for future cases if the court decides to rule in the artists’ favor.