CNET on p2p vs Hollywood
p2pnet.net News View:- “Entertainment lawyers are paid to be nasty,” says CNET News executive editor Charles Cooper.
That they are, and they succeed. But Cooper is worried that if they manage to browbeat America’s senior court on behalf of the entertainment industry, the baby may go out with the bathwater.
A decision by California’s 9th Circuit Court of Appeals last August, “unexpectedly upheld the validity of P2P file-sharing services,” he points out. “The court found that providers of online file-swapping technology could not be held liable for aiding copyright infringement, in a decision that contained shades of the Sony-Betamax decision two decades earlier.”
Well, the court didn’t exactly rule file-swapping technology couldn’t be held liable for, “aiding” infringement. Rather, in MGM v Grokster, it ruled plainly, unequivocally and unanimously that the distributors of the Grokster and Morpheus p2p applications can’t be held liable for users’ copyright infrigements.
And whether or not the decision was unexpected depends entirely on which side of the fence you’re sitting, of course. But be that as it may, “The entertainment industry was livid,” says Cooper. “How could the law allow companies that damned well knew they were facilitating illegal file swapping to stay in business?” —
— Especially when the record label cartel and major studios have spent so much time and money buying political support, exerted so much pressure on so many media outlets it owns outright or controls through advertising dollars and direct or indirect associations with other businesses to blank out all views except its own, and victimized close to 8,500 innocent-until-proven-guilty men, women and children as it tries to paint p2p file sharing and p2p file sharers, black.
Enter Betamax.
“In 1984, the Supreme Court determined that Sony was not liable for copyright infringement just because its Betamax video tape recorder might be used by people engaged in infringing activities,” Cooper goes on. “The content industry has been itching to knock down this decision ever since. Now it has another chance.”
The industry has been told ‘No!” twice before. But court decisions don’t feature in the world of money the entertainment industry controls and, “Truth be told, I’ve had a tough time trying to decide who to support in this cat fight,” says Cooper.
“I roll my eyes whenever senior executives at Grokster and StreamCast claim they don’t know how their technology gets used. They’d have a better chance convincing me there are huge stockpiles of WMD hiding in Laura Bush’s armoire than to insist on pleading ignorance.
“I still can’t bring myself to root for the control freaks in Hollywood. The power brokers who run the show are so focused on the piracy rate part of the story they keep missing the bigger revenue growth rate takeaway.
“So they make up a cock-and-bull story that Grokster and StreamCast exert the same kind of centralized control as a Napster. In fact, Napster got shut down because it owned and operated servers that facilitated illegal file swapping.”
Speaking as a consumer (”and occasional file downloader – legally, of course!”), “it should be as easy to use content legally as it is illegally,” says Cooper. “Case in point: the flourishing business that grew up around online music stores.”
Speaking of cock-and-bull and cases in point, there is no online music stores business, flourishing or otherwise. Online sales are at around 250 million, built up since 2003, and they’ve come almost entirely through Apple’s iPod loss-lead iTunes site.
Against that, well over a billion files go computer-to-computer via the hundreds of p2p networks and clients every month.
The entertainment studios took forever to bless the concept of online stores and that, “opened the door for Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs, who moved on his hunch about how the future was being reshaped,” Cooper says, adding:
“Ever since Napster got closed down, the content industry’s strategy for dealing with the peer-to-peer challenge can be summed up in three words: Sue the bastards. Everyone of sane mind can agree there’s a need to address digital piracy. But how about trying something more nuanced than a sledgehammer approach?”
Don’t stay tuned.
JN
Something you think we should know? tips[at]p2pnet.net
===================
See:-
industry was livid – Why punish the technology?, CNET News, January 28, 2005
innocent-until-proven-guilty – RIAA nails more people, p2pnet, January 29, 2005
since 2003 – Apple’s 250 million in sales, p2pnet, January 24, 2005
January 31st, 2005 at 1:21 am
Actually, the WMDs are in Imelda Marcos’ shoes.
Don’t buy anymore CDs.
Don’t buy from iTunes.
Don’t buy from Napster.
Don’t buy from Walmart.com, et al
January 31st, 2005 at 4:30 pm
Too much credit is given to the Supreme Court Betamax decision, as if that was a complex legal case or if it broke new grounf. Nonsense!
Actually the Betamax cases evolved arounf the moronic idea that a product that could be used for illegal action could be banished.
Long before the Betamax there were guns, photocopier, knives, cameras, tape recorders, political parties, controlled substances, the legal system, and an infinite number goods and services that could be used both legally and not legally and none had been banished because of it, at least successfully. Even the atomic bomb has not been succesfully banished. No one can ever have that power.
The issue was not resolved with Betamax but when men began to think, in prehistory, that products. goods and services cannot be banished because they can be used for illegal purposes or better worded, for bad purposes.
The fact that the issue is being raised again is really a a damnation of the legal system, one that seems unable to get anything straight. One that, BTW, is frequently used for bad purposes.
Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com
January 31st, 2005 at 11:20 pm
How about outlawing the Internet altogether. After all, Improperly used it can be a tremendous infringement system, particularly when in hand of anyone not knowledegeable about the laws of every country.
Actually the inventor of the Internet must have known that the primary use of the Internet was eventually going to be an unstoppable system to copy everything in sight, as soon as any sofware was made available for the internet through a browser. It was very predictable.
Also the the inventor of the browser must have known that the main use of the browser was to locate information that could be infringed. Infringement was really simplified with browser with downloading options.
And let us not forget the creator of the search engine. These had the same purpose as the browsers: To locate material to infringe. They can even locate the the p2p software for the infringer.
Inventiveness is dangerous to society and must be stopped, the copyright cartels are saying.