Browser-Based Peer-to-Peer Clients and Copyright Infringement

We have created a browser extension called Fusion Fox to integrate the BitTorrent file sharing protocol into the Firefox web browser. Fusion Fox adds support to the browser for a BitTorrent URL type, which can be used like any other URL. It thus enables the transparent use of BitTorrent to retrieve media content for HTML image tags or an embedded media player. This means that somebody viewing the content on a web site might also be redistributing that content to other people without being aware of it, which poses legal problems, as copying and making a work available to the public are exclusive rights of the copyright's owner. The paper surveys the legal issues that FusionFox thus raises.