A beta preview of Opera 8.02 with BitTorrent embedded was released today. Users can choose whether or not to include BitTorrent at installation. For those who choose to include the program, language has been added requiring users to take responsibility for BitTorrent files.
"You are about to start a BitTorrent download,” a popup states in the new version of Opera. “Please note that you will share the content you receive with other people who download the same files. Are you sure you want to do this?"
The Supreme Court last week declared that software developers are legally responsible for illegal acts of users who employ their applications if it can be determined that developers induced users to commit illegal acts.
Opera advocates say that the company probably will receive criticism from content providers, but that the company is not promoting dissemination of illegal material because it places the onus of responsibility on the user.
Opera, whose market share is generally considered to be behind that of Firefox and ahead of Netscape [various releases of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer dominate the market at about 80 percent], is the first browser technology to offer P2P support, a technology that has been under attack since the birth of Napster in 1998.
Opera Engineering Vice President Christen Krogh said P2P support was inevitable.
"Viewing [P2P] as a download protocol, in the same way as you can view HTTP, it seems like a normal extension of the capabilities of a browser," he said.