While the Swedes are busy finding more representatives of the recording industry they can talk into participating in various roles in legal action against filesharers, I thought to write a post to exhibit what is likely to turn out to be my supreme ignorance of IP law.

Having set your expectations appropriately low, how's this for a proposition:

Torrent file authors assert intellectual ownership over their Metainfo file by prominently displaying a copyright notice by its link on the webpage it is uploaded to. A license to use the bittorrent file is granted to users which contains a clause that the licensee will not sue any peers encountered during the download. Violation of this clause renders the license void, in effect making the suing party a copyright violator.

The idea contains more than a slight whiff of the patent retaliation clauses which are becoming fashionable (and necessary). And why not?

In US copyright law, a work does not have to be new or highly creative to qualify for copyright protection as an original work of authorship. Facts are not copyrightable, but a Metainfo file is more than facts, there is also for example a choice of piece size as well as suggested name and so on. That compilations (themselves simply an ordering of non-original material) are copyrightable argues for bittorrent Metainfo files being copyrightable.

There is the obvious problem that the copyright notice and license conditions would need to follow the torrent around. If the author uploads the Metainfo file to site A with the copyright notice and license, site B could in practise grab the torrent and makes it available without. Users downloading from site B would therefore remain blissfully ignorant of the legal status of the Metainfo file, but fortunately ignorance of the legal status is not a defence any sober attorney will be happy with to any extent.

What am I missing here, apart from the challenge of getting torrent sites and users accustomed to licensing (not that implicitly accepting the GPL ever slowed my apt-getting down)?