CBS forced to respond to injunction that prevents CNET from talking torrents

CBS Interactive has filed a response to an injunction that is keeping CNET's journalists from talking about bit torrent technology. The injunction alleges that by CNET talking about, and linking to, P2P software that can be used for illegal purposes, they are encouraging users and causing it to become more pervasive.

CBSI has responded to the injunction claiming just the opposite. They say that because they provide warnings about not using the technology to infringe on copyrights, they are actually doing more good. They warn that the software is still publicly available and wouldn't come with these warnings if found by a Google search.

If CBSI were enjoined from linking to sites that offer downloads of BitTorrent clients, those sites would still remain available to the public and would still be easily found by a simple search on Google - albeit without the warning against infringement that CBSI provides. Moreover, the public interest would be damaged by denying legitimate and truthful information about a pervasive technology, as well as by impending non-infriging uses.

The bit torrent technology has many benefits and uses besides illegal downloading. Bit torrent swarms can provide theoretically unlimited bandwidth and download speed because they can provide an unlimited number of peers. It also works great for redundancy as one server can go down and the file is still available from many other sources, albeit at a reduced speed.

We'll keep an eye on how this injunction ends up working out. Until then, do you think CBS or TweakTown should be prevented from talking about torrents and/or linking to torrent software? Let us know!