Spain, though part of Europe, seems to be worlds apart as the only country that has realized the difference between piracy and illegal file-sharing.

For Raul N. Orejuda Garcia, Magistrate Court judge of Mercantile number 7, ruled recently that "P2P networks, as a mere transmission of data between Internet users, does not violate, in principle, any right protected by the Intellectual Property Law."

In particular, he said that P2P transfers are not one of the "clear and specific behaviors that the law forbids, in particular reproduction, distribution and public communication without authorization."

The case was part of a suit brought by a coalition of the country’s entertainment industry against eD2K website elrincondejesus, the owner of which rightly pointed out that it only provided links to content much like Google or any of the other search engines out there.

“As you know Elrincondejesus.com never had advertising (or has now)," he said. "I’m innocent and the only thing that I have done is provided links to other sites, like thousands of search engines in the world.”

The case is certainly a departure from the ruling against Swedish BitTorrent tracker site the Pirate Bay which made the same argument, but was convicted for the facilitation of copyright infringement nonetheless.

“Adding a work or video recording to eMule, that has previously been converted to a computer file, compatible with that program, is not an act of reproduction,” reads the ruling. "Copying is not a profitable use, or collective, as these two terms refer to the subsequent use made of the work once downloaded, after the copy. "

The court also says that illegal distribution requires something "tangible" to exist, like a website, and on which the actual sharing must occur. This doesn’t happen in P2P where the transfer of data occurs between individuals.

It recognizes the possibility that unauthorized public communication, or distribution, of copyrighted material may have occurred, but that it’s difficult to prove being that it "may well be possible that the file-sharing was with one person."

The case echoes a similar ruling by Spanish Judge Paz Aldecoa back in November of 2006 who found that since there was "“no talk of money or any other compensation beyond the sharing of material available among various users" then P2P didn’t therefore violate the tenets of the country’s copyright laws since it was only about obtaining "copies for private use" which is legal.

It may also bolster concerns by the Congressional Anti-Piracy Caucus which placed Spain on its “2009 International Piracy Watch List." It complained that “P2P piracy is widely perceived as an acceptable cultural phenomenon, and the situation is exacerbated by a government policy that has essentially decriminalized illicit P2P file-sharing.”

Is making a distinction between those who download for profit and those who don’t really decriminalization? We always take into account the motives behind crimes and punish accordingly. That’s why we have various degrees of murder, theft, and even assault vis a vis "hate crimes."

Why should P2P be any different?

Stay tuned.

[PC via TF]

jared@zeropaid.com

Sometimes, it takes a long time for a new version of eMule to be released. Other times, it takes only a couple of short months. In this case, it only took two months for a new version of eMule to be released.

“Barely two and a half months have passed,” writes the eMule development team, “and yet another new eMule version is on the horizon. 0.49b continues to complete the agenda of its predecessor in the 0.49 series. This means further optimizations for Kad and more important immunity against recently researched routing attacks, several improvements of the GUI for Vista users, a new UPnP implementation, easier connecting to Kad for new users and fixing of an important bug which slipped into the last version.”

The updates fixes numerous security issues and bugs, but maintains the major improvements from the previous version. A changelog was also released. Here are some of the highlights:

• Added a new search method option “Automatic” which lets eMule choose which search method to use. eMule will select either Servers (Local) or Kad, based on which network we are connected to and some other indicators if connected to both networks.
• Implemented a special nodes.dat version, which is more suited for mass distribution without causing significant additional traffic for the included nodes. This hopefully allows us to add a nodes.dat to the installer, so that new user can connect to Kad without having to connect to servers or downloading a nodes.dat themself
• Implemented an alternate method to estimate the total user count in the Kad network, which is not based on our local routing table. Its experimental and only shown in the network dialog (double click the world icon in the status bar)
• Several changes were made to Kad in order to defy routing attacks researched by University of Minnesota guys [Peng Wang, James Tyra, Eric Chan-Tin, Tyson Malchow, Denis Foo Kune, Nicholas Hopper, Yongdae Kim], in particular:
  • Kad contacts will only be able to update themself in others routing tables if they provide the proper key (supported by 0.49a+ nodes) in order to make it impossible to hijack them
  • Kad uses now a three-way-handshake (or for older version a similar check) for new contacts, making sure they do not use a spoofed IP
  • Unverified contacts are not used for routing tasks and a marked with a special icon in the GUI
• Fixed: Memory leak in context menus.

Perhapse the biggest improvement was the second item in the highlights because a concern for some eMule users was that if all the servers shut down, will people have to get a nodes.dat file so they can get connected to the Kad network?

Basically, Kad works by users connecting to an IP address on a network. When that user connects to that IP address, others can connect to the network by connecting to the users IP address. Often the simplest way to connect to Kad is simply connect to an ED2K server which will frequently have plenty of users connecting to the Kad network as well – thus making it easy to connect to the Kad network.

If you don’t connect to a server, you can download a nodes.dat file which contains a number of IP addresses. When a user uses that nodes.dat file, the hope is that one of those IP addresses, at least, is connected to the network so as to establish a connection in the network. Afterwards, eMule just remembers several IP addresses so that if the client is shut down for a period of time, it just looks up those addresses when it is started up again at a later time.

It appears that this improvement bi-passes all of this and allows users to simply connect to the Kad network without either having to download a nodes.dat file or connect to an existing ED2K server. It seems eMule keeps getting better and better.

eMule Download page

When a developer opens the source code to their software – especially for P2P software – a number of interesting things can happen. One of the interesting things is the possibility of fork projects or even modifications. One of the major features in the eMule community is the numerous spinoff projects that are being released, continually developed, and are well-used by tens of thousands of users.

Of course, the question newcomers generally raise is which one to use. The general rule of thumb is that if a user is new to the client and protocols of eMule, a user should stick with the original version. Once a user has gained a sufficient amount of experience using the software, that’s when they may want to test drive modifications, or mods. eMule mods won’t make downloading faster, but they do offer numerous advanced features that eMule generally doesn’t offer – at least offer in the short term as some features do, in fact, wind their way back to the original version.

One mod, which also was recently updated, is eMule MorphXT. Leuk_He, the main developer of the mod recently announced the release of the latest version of Morph XT.

“It contains some stability improvement from out newest team member[fafner],” leuk_he said, “and a whole bunch of other tweaks you can read in the changelog.”

The changelog:

18-05-2008
Compiled with visual studio 2003 sp1.
should also work with vs 2005 sp1

Merged to 0.49a [Stulle]
CHANGE:update libping to 1.28 (which is same source as 1.27) [leuk_he]
CHANGE:update CxImage to 6.00 (we use the rather complete lib) [Stulle]
CHANGE:update cryptolib Version 5.5.2 (9/24/2007)
FIX: clients downloading during large file completion stuck with ’stalled, reading from disk’ [fafner]
ADD: spreadbars to history [fafner]
ADD: percentage client already got in QueueList and UploadList [fafner]
ADD: chunk number to chunk details in UploadList [fafner]
ADD: Show much verbose info on content-> mediafinfo.dll (if you disable advanced options mediainfo_RIFF for avi files…)
ADD: (BETA!) download ack overhead used in in upload calculation
ADD: show if server obfuscation key is available
FIX: use part.met.bak files instead of hardly ever seen valid part.met.backup files. [leuk_he]
ADD: experimental support for visual studio 2005 sp1. See readme. [fafner/rapid mule/leuk_he]
ADD: alpha support for vs2008, make very sure to read the readme.
CHANGE: reduce some cpu under wine [leuk_he]
CHANGE: Using a different method to create captcha due to new version of CxImage lib [Stulle]
CHANGE: FriendSlots now saved in 0×03 (0×2 occupied by official) [Stulle]
REMOVED: SafeKAD (the Officials did a big step in that direction) [Stulle]
REMOVED: KAD optimizations (what ever ) [Stulle]

Official homepage
Sourceforge Page

Users who want to install eMule for the first time should use the Installer. Users who are updating from a previous version should download the Binaries (file labeled “bin”), unzip the package in the eMule directory and replace all of the files.

digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/tech_news/eMule_MorphXT_Gets_an_Update_Version_11_0_Released’;

The legal action, which will also include claims for compensation under civil law, is “the biggest single action against illegal file sharing,” according to the London-based International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).