more on well worthwhile document on the merits of the RIAA suit against the PU student

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Brad Templeton <brad () templetons com>
Organization: http://www.templetons.com/brad
Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2003 11:30:14 -0700
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Re: [IP] well worthwhile document on the merits of the RIAA suit
against the PU student


Dave, it is worth pointing out that Wake is technologically
indistinguishable
from Archie.  Newcomers to the internet may not remember Peter J. Deutsch's
Archie, but it was the internet's first search engine, one of the first
new applications to strike it big.  Archie traversed and indexed all open
FTP
servers on the internet, and let you easily search them.  You could type in
a file name, quickly see who had the file, and download it.  Later Archie
clients did it all automatically -- type in the file, point and click to
download it.

While archie did help people find "warez" most of its use was entirely
legitimate searching for free software and documents.

The important point is that Archie is the grandfather of Google.  The whole
concept of internet searching and a large part of the internet boom can
point
back to tools like Archie.  To declare that writing it was illegal would
fly against what built the net, and seems an unlikely course.


------ End of Forwarded Message

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