Bad for Grokster, StreamCast?
p2pnet.net News View:- While the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) hailed the Supreme Courts justices for their questions, it remains to be seen if the defendants provided the right answers – especially on why the defendants base their case on the Sony v Betamax rule.
Questions & Answers
Richard Taranto, representing Grokster and StreamCast, argued that the court must adhere to the "clear Sony rule" in judging the case.
But the Sony ruling "goes on for 13 more pages," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, and if one reads further, one can see the primary use of the Betamax machine was for time-shifting.
"If the standard was that clear, the court would have stopped there," she continued. "I don’t think you can take one sentence from a rather long opinion and say, ‘Ah-hah, we have a clear rule.’ "
Allies of the file-sharing networks in various technology industries and civil liberties organizations have depicted file sharing as a useful, if not vital, means of expanding knowledge through the inexpensive transmission and Net archiving of lawful material in the public domain.
As long as the non-infringing uses weren’t "far-fetched," Taranto said, the defense that applied to videocassette recorders should be available for his clients’ "autonomous communication tool," as he described file sharing.
Sony rule
Justice Ginsburg may have hinted in her exchange that the Sony rule should not extend to software or the internet as it may only be suited towards hardware appliances.
In essence, her words suggest the Sony-rule of substantial non-infringing uses was time-shifting. Considered in the time-frame of two decades ago; time-shifting was a new consumer liberty made possible by tangible products – the VCR and video cassettes
The Sony ruling is set in a tangible world.
Now enter the digital age.
What are the new consumer liberties in the digital age? Are they substantial? Better yet, could those liberties be classified as non-infringing?
Copying and sharing are new consumer liberties that have taken on a whole new significance in the digital era. They aren’t bound by tangible products. These liberties are substantial but can’t be fully exonerated as non-infringing under current copyright laws.
Why not?
Tangible means scarcity, which in turns means economic value that’s protected by copyright laws. But if something is non-tangible and thereby abundant with no economic value, should those same laws then apply for protection?
The copyright law wasn’t designed to answer this question and Sony v Betamax won’t fix that.
"I think the court is going to affirm (the lower-court rulings)," CNET News has copyright attorney Ronald Katz saying. "This doesn’t fit in with the way copyright law is written. But it’s not surprising that the law doesn’t fit with something that didn’t exist at the time the law was made."
Raymond Blijd – fk2w
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See:-
CNET News - Supreme Court may redefine file swapping, March 29, 2005
March 31st, 2005 at 4:15 pm
If the Supremes decide with MGM, then the US is on a slippery slope. That can only lead us down the road to destruction.
Can Ford be sued if a vehicle they made is used by a madman to run down a group of children. Knowing it could happen would be enough.
What about cameras? Can NIKON, MINOLTA, CANON, be sued because their products can be used to photograph copyrighted works, or trademarked properties?
The list goes on..could an inmate sue a soap manufactuer if his drops the soap in the shower and gets the prison version of hide the ******?
What if I take a Loiusville Slugger baseball bat and beat the crap out of my next door neighbor? Should he sue me or Louisville slugger? Shoudl you be able to sue the farmer who raised the cow that wnent into the McDonalds burger that made you fat? (nevermind the fact you ate 10 a day for 6 months).
March 31st, 2005 at 4:19 pm
What about radio broadcasts? If I was to use a cassette recorder to record a song off of the radio, so that I could play it later, wouldn’t that be considered time-shifting? If so, then what difference would it make if I was to record the song onto my computer? Technically it would be legal by the Sony v Betamax ruling. Most of the songs I download, I only download because I heard them on the radio and they got stuck in my head. Grokster would just be considered the tool by which I received the recording.
March 31st, 2005 at 7:53 pm
Further examination of the Betamax case reveals that the Supreme Court would never make a ruling that would jeopardize the development of new technology. If that’s the case, it doesn’t matter why the Supreme Court judged that VCR’s were because of the substantial non-infringing use of time-shifting.
Think about it for a minute. How many more substantial non-infringing uses can you think P2P file sharing has? What about those that own their own music and WANT it shared on P2P networks? What about other files that can be regularly shared with P2P networks? Word documents, spreadsheets, database files, etc. The possibilities are endless with regard what non-infringing uses this software can, and already has, developed. Ruling in favor of MGM would stop this technology dead in its tracks, and threaten many other technological advances. Copyright law was never written to STOP advances in technology, nor should it ever be allowed to.
March 31st, 2005 at 10:36 pm
I will make the assumption that the author meant digital and analogue, not digital and tangible. My computer is decidedly tangible. I program the software to download television the same way as I program my VCR firmware. The data just comes through my phone line instead of the airwaves. It saves to my tangible HDD, rather than my tangible video cassette.
If the Betamax principles are right, then it does not matter if we are talking about a digital or analogue world. Distinguishing the two is almost as close minded as the industry that is refusing to realise the internet age.
It is the wisdom of Betamax to allow technology to be given time to grow and develop that is important. As seen in the briefs, that is what Grokster is arguing, not that the technologies are identical (as suggested by this author).
Moving onto the liberties point, if you want some good, qualified analysis on the idea that there is no decision on the lawfulness of file sharing (and hence perhaps no infringement anyway), take a look at the technology law professors brief:
http://www.eff.org/IP/P2P/MGM_v_Grokster/20050301_tech_law_profs_usacm.pdf
April 4th, 2005 at 11:13 am
It would be easy to dismiss my arguments as complete bullshit. As matter of fact Iâll be the first to retract my baloney if a comprehensive independent study showed that Iâm a certified nutcase and have eaten way too many Mikey D burgers.
However, fact is copyright law is design to protect the economic incentive for creators (and their investors!!). In the digital age the incentives are drifting away from economic. In the long run this will strain and ultimately snap the link between law and internet driven technology.
The Sony âMagna Cartaâ rule based on current copyright law (exactly patent law) canât fix that balanced.
Copyright law in the digital millennium is like driving a train on a highway and is not suited for the digital age. Lets start thinking about something else.
Raymond Blijd
April 4th, 2005 at 12:43 pm
I’m not the only one:
“Will the Court find a way to reconcile the Betamax ruling with file sharing activities?
I suspect some of the Justices will favor a new approach to assessing file sharing technology, one that pays homage to the established economic power of the Copyright Owners.”
red on : http://blogbook.org/tech_ip/archives/000328.html