INDUCE: Apocalyse now?
p2pnet.net News Feature:- I wasn’t at Thursday’s (July 22) Induce Act hearing that changed so many minds. But one peculiar statement did catch my attention:
‘No threat to iPod from blanket P2P ban, says US’. Vermont’s top Democrat on the panel, Patrick Leahy, echoed Hatch’s comments. So while everybody was hauling tar and feathers for Orrin Hatch I started reading S. 2560 (Induce Act) again.
Will the Induce Act really kill p2p? And what’s all the fuss about?
What a lot us don’t know is that inducing infringement is nothing new to IP law. It’s been slumbering in Patent statutes for a while now (17 USC 271(b)). The question is: Did it kill patent innovations and drive investors overseas? At the rate I see new patents being filed in the US, I’d like to suggest it didn’t. More important, patent holders had just one patent to defend and used the ‘induce’ clause sparsely. With copyrights, on the other hand, owners have a whole repertoire of protected work they can use.
So, in the hands of RIAA and MPAA the Induce Act could spell trouble for a whole range of people. But could it spell the end of p2p?
I have my doubts.
According the Induce Act one has to determine ‘intent’ and as easy as it sounds, it often hasn’t been successfully proven in patent cases.
The whole basis of p2p is file sharing files without regard to content. It’s based on nothing more than breaking down files into data, transferring them, and repackaging them at destination and if I’m not mistaken, that’s how the internet works as well.
The difference is that p2p tries to decentralize the transfer as much as possible for it to get to more users, faster. Therefore, file transferring doesn’t irrevocably determine ‘intent to infringe’. And if the Induce Act became applicable in the Morpheus / Grokster case, I still think the end result would be the same.
Who are they going after with the Induce Act?
I hope the industry would leave conceivers, developers and users alone.
The investors, however, are too juicy for them to pass up.
Bottom-line: The iPod might be safe but Apple isn’t. And the same applies to Toshiba, et al.
=================
Raymond Blijd is a freelance legal ICT consultant and legal knowledge system engineer based in The Netherlands.
July 27th, 2004 at 3:57 am
reguardless of what the INTENT of induce is, we all know that the RIAA and MPAA will twist that intent around to legally go after anyone and anything it perceives as a threat. They don’t need to be right, just the threat alone will still a lot of inovation
July 27th, 2004 at 11:21 am
you make it sound like american laws apply world wide, most of the planet isnt amercian territory, and believe it or not the rest of the world has just as much internet access, it everywhere. in the end even if the impossible did happen and all peer to peer technology (or even all internet access) was cut off from america it wouldnt have a massive effect on the rest of the world, gnutella would still run, kazza would unfortunatly live to see another day, google would continue to dominate the internets competing search engines.
The world does not revolve around america, america revolves just as much as the rest of the world
July 27th, 2004 at 5:33 pm
you sure got THAT right
July 28th, 2004 at 2:56 am
yes but the entertainment industry will use the American law as a model to push around the world. their influence stretches well beyond our boarders