BitTorrent, one of the world's most popular sites used for downloading of music and movies, has just added another legal use in case anyone is keeping score. In 1984 when the Supreme Court handed down its landmark contributory infringement case in Sony Pictures v. Universal City Studios, the highest court of the land allowed Sony's Betamax Recording system (which was replaced by the VCR by the time the case reached the Supreme Court) to continue to be on the market because of its non-infringing fair use potential. This basically translates to the following- if a product that could be used for illegal purposes also has substantial non-infringing uses, the product could escape secondary liability for copyright infringement.
Over the weekend, Facebook announced that it uses the popular downloading site to transfer updates through code to its tens of thousands of servers.Other companies that have copped to using BitTorrent for similar purposes include Twitter and Blizzard's World of Warcraft online subscriber system.
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