jesus there's a lot of knee-jerking going on here
It seems like most people who've commented here are just dying to jump on the bandwagon with all the other armchair revolutionaries out there.
Look, WD is saying: Here's a hard drive. Use it however you want. It also has some hardware built in to make it useful as a server, a way for you to access stuff on your drive when you're away from home. We've also included some software to help you do that sort of thing, and we'll let you use this "mionet" setup if you want. That's what most 'home users' would want it for -- log in from work to grab an mp3 from home, or the like. Now, if you want to turn one of these things into a server that distributes media content (to your friends, or your customers, or whatever -- whether it's legally yours or not) then you'll want to use something other than "mionet" to do it. It's not designed for that, and we really don't want the hassle of having to defend ourselves against charges of enabling a sort of p2p network for anonymous file-sharing. Share all you want, just don't use our service to do it. We don't care if it's legal content you're sharing or not -- it's not really designed as a commercial content server, either, or anything other than a convenience to the user in being able to access his files when away from home."
That doesn't seem like they're trying to "dictate" anything other than what sort of content they want to run over their service. *shrug* Which is fine. You can use whatever sort of server software you want to on the thing, if that's what you want to do.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
