A pair of UC Berkeley SIMS (School of Information and Management) students (Bill French and Parker Thompson) have, for their masters' degree project, developed new P2P music sharing software called, Trifecta. The subtitle of their project, "Creating P2P Software that Enables Fair Use," shows that this is not simply an engineering project, but a legal one as well (as befits students of Pam Samuelson). The software is described thus:

Trifecta allows users to lend and stream sound recordings to friends and other personal acquaintances, two uses that we maintain are fair because private, noncommercial sharing and performance are consistent with the rights afforded to consumers by the first sale doctrine and the right of private performance.

I liked what I read in a brief skim of the paper. Whether the system actually provides full legal protection is subject to debate (I, of course, think it should be legal when used as intended). Of course, there would be ways to subvert the intention of the project, but why bother since much more open P2P systems are already out there?

via Not Quite A Blog