Murder, Rape and Robbery on the High Seas

Your spontaneous thought when seeing the word piracy is hardly what you just read in the title. And now you're already thinking it; oh god, another Jane Blogger that is going to defend her wrong-doings with some twisted view on reality.

Wrong.

I bumped into some speculation as to whether Aufero was intended for legitimate or illegitimate downloads. At first I was going to just ignore it and roll my eyes at it but as I started thinking about it it slowly became a concern. But let's start with sending the speculation on its merry way: Personally I will of course never use it for any illegitimate purpose, what you do with it is up to you. That said, the code is very versatile and could easily be adapted to do ... anything related.

Now, I am not a lawyer but I dare say that writing this software can hardly be considered a wrong-doing. Anyone with half a keyboard could dig up exactly the same information that Aufero uses. But what made me concerned was the fact that they might think I am, for instance, using Aufero to retrieve media for which I do not have a license (I am not of course). I do not intend to make any money from Aufero. What kind of case would any organization have? Organization being MPAA, RIAA, legal authorities, whatever?

I bring up MPAA, RIAA tongue in cheek really, this is exactly the kind of paranoia they want everyone to have and they are slowly getting there. Good on them. I wish them luck.

But honestly, if you are older than 18 I bet you'd stop getting bootlegs or rips off the net if you could get it legitimately and it had the following properties:

1. Decent price (tricky one, think about it)
   
2. Not DRM infested
   
3. Quality at level of your average Xvid DVDrip
4. Available at about the time when DVD's hit stores
5. Available online
   

I know, I know. If all of those were true the whole industry would have to change, video rental business as we know it would be out the door. In fact, most of what they have built their business model on in the last fifty years would be out the door. It's outdated. So I kindly ask them: Please, deal with it.

By the way, bootlegging originally meant hiding liquor in the legs of your boots during the prohibition era. How it came to mean making an unauthorized recording is unclear. [*]

It might be a remarkably stupid question, but what are the legal implications for a developer here? If any?