p2pnet - rss feed: The challenge of p2p
p2pnet.net News:- The Grokster v MGM decision will be arriving shortly, perhaps this coming Monday or maybe the Monday after.
Whichever way it goes, it’ll have a major impact on p2p and file sharing.
"The recording industry has initiated many lawsuits against peer to peer file sharing technology developers and individual file sharers." posted University of California at Berkeley professor Pamela Samuelson for Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Technology: Legal and Policy Challenges.
"They have also tried to persuade federal prosecutors to bring criminal cases against file sharers and technology developers and sought additional legislation to increase penalties for file sharing and to change dramatically the liability rules for developers of infringement-enabling technologies." she went on. "For the past twenty years, since the Supreme Court’s Sony Betamax decision, technologists have known technologies capable of substantial noninfringing uses could be developed free from copyright owner control, but this may soon change.
"This seminar will consider a range of policy alternatives available to respond to the challenges P2P technologies and file sharing pose for the entertainment industry and the implications of each alternative."
More recently, "Many students wrote quite insightful papers and Pam asked a few of them for permission to post their papers publicly," says the intro to a web page that went up on June 9.
It features summaries and links to the papers, with .pdf links for those students who agreed to public posting.
It’s called Towards solutions to ‘the p2p problem’.
Read on >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Susheel Daswani - Premature Optimization
With respect to the specific legal and policy challenges presented by p2p music file sharing, a voluntary collective licensing scheme should be devised and implemented. The voluntary collective license will solve the largest issues in the current debate regarding p2p file sharing ? compensating artists while promoting the further technological development of p2p technology. This system will be architected by a coalition of music artists, music copyright owners (i.e., record labels), and technology companies, but the implicit policy actor will be the market. This solution explicitly preserves the Sony-Betamax doctrine, which will allow p2p, and other unforeseen innovations, to grow into expected and unexpected areas. If the various parties cannot agree to impose a voluntary collective license, then new business models will arise so as to remunerate artists while preserving the validity of p2p file sharing systems.
Benjamin Hill - The Legal P2P ‘Singularity’
Legislative protection that provides for a fair and balanced market of copyrighted material becomes much more challenging as new technology including peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) reduces the transaction costs of obtaining copyrighted material. This paper examines the current state of P2P trading and technology in relation to the currently applicable laws, and makes proposals on how the existing laws could be modified to better adapt to the rapidly changing forefront of technology. These laws will lose much of their relevance as P2P technology approaches what I call the ?P2P Singularity? of completely anonymous file exchange, where identification and prosecution of infringing individual users becomes technically infeasible. At this point, the majority of the laws protecting digital copyrighted material loose much of their relevance as the cost and ability to enforce the laws becomes drastically higher than the overall benefit gained. After the networks have evolved to this point, this paper examines several of the new business models that copyright owners could adopt in order to continue to profit.
Andrew Inesi - A Legal Approach To p2p File-Sharing
Peer-to-peer file-sharing technologies (?P2P?) pose a significant challenge to copyright law. Tens of millions of people regularly violate copyright using P2P networks, a tide of infringement copyright holders have been unable to stop. Numerous commentators have proposed legal responses to the P2P phenomenon, but most of these proposals have one of two weaknesses: either they take a myopic view of the problem, proposing a quick fix that does not address the larger issues raised by P2P, or they propose a radical copyright overhaul, likely to take years, without any provision for current harms. This Essay takes a middle ground, arguing that a full response to P2P requires more time, information, and debate, but that several small steps should be taken to reduce immediate harms.
Part I provides an extended examination of the P2P problem, with the twin aims of defining its contours and providing guideposts toward its solution. It has three main conclusions. First, given the current lack of information regarding the incentive effects of P2P, any immediate legal response should be conservative. Second, the two clear P2P harms that should be addressed in the short term are harm to the rule of law and the related harm of high copyright enforcement costs. Third, the debate over P2P is in many way inseparable from the broader challenges facing copyright, and should be treated as such.
Tara Matthews - Copyright Control v. Digital Technology: A Policy Suggestion
In this paper, I begin with a discussion of the MGM v. Grokster Supreme Court case. I argue that the Supreme Court should uphold the Sony safe-harbor for technology with significant non-infringing uses (SNIUs). I explain how a ruling favored by copyright owners would not give them control of their works, which makes excessive restrictions on technology impractical. I then discuss the legislation I advocate that Congress pass, which would codify Sony and add a third form of secondary liability called ?active inducement.? I present wording for an active inducement law that targets violators as those who show specific intent to induce infringement, massive distribution of copyrighted works, and commercial gain from infringement. Finally, I discuss ramifications of this law on copyright owners and argue that their best option is to adapt their business models to work with technology.
Brooke Maury - Music, Technology and the Law: A Discussion of the Problem and a Modest Proposal
In the pages that follow, you will find a critique of two compulsory licensing schemes that have been proposed to move us out of the current impasse. As I will discuss in greater detail below, these proposals are cumbersome from a regulatory perspective, and make some peculiar assumptions about who should bare the cost of the widespread infringement occurring on P2P networks. The conclusion that I draw from this analysis is that compulsory licensing is not an optimal solution in the immediate future.
The second goal of this paper is to provide an affirmative recommendation for action, although I am not convinced that great changes are required in existing law to address this problem. It is quite possible that ?the System still Works,? and that what we are witnessing is the natural evolution of the means by which music and artistic expression are promoted and consumed by society. But some tweaks to the legal code may be required. My recommendation is therefore more concerned with clearing up some legal ambiguities in existing law and doctrine, and increasing the efficiency by which copyright holders may enforce their rights. I propose we do this by clarifying the parameters of the ?staple article of commerce? doctrine established in the Sony vs. Universal Supreme Court case, and establishing an arbitration process that lowers the costs of seeking legal remedies against direct infringers. The stated goal is to promote a respect for copyright in the digital era while enabling and encouraging the growth of novel, profitable business models. Some of these strategies are nascent in today?s economy and quite probably dominant in tomorrow?s economy. This discussion is limited in scope to the music industry because it is the first content industry to be so affected by this latest tangle with technology. If this proposal should be accepted and implemented, perhaps it will provide insight as to how we can address similar problems in related industries. Before I begin my analysis of the current problem, I wish to make some general comments on the background against which this debate is framed.
Elizabeth Miles - To: The Committee on the Judiciary […]; Re: Digital Copyright Regulation?A Public-Regarding Response to the Sony Debate and Peer-to-Peer Technology
This paper advises that so long as legislators look to accounts of the P2P situation couched only in legal-economic terms, they will draft inapt laws at significant cost to individuals, cultural vitality, and society as a whole. Toward a more comprehensive solution tailored to digital distribution technology, the paper frames current legal proposals in theories advanced by ethnomusicologists, who study music not just as a commodity but as a cultural force with behavior-shaping powers of its own. The conclusion of this analysis is that Congress must develop digital copyright law in directions that do not further commodify creative work, but instead combine a restrained legislative approach to technologies capable of disseminating creative works with active agency engagement in emerging issues.
Specifically, Congress should:
- Codify an elaborated version of the Sony safe harbor to promote technological innovation and prevent an undesirable allocation of enforcement responsibility to third parties.
- Amend the § 1201 subpoena process in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to facilitate direct enforcement efforts while also ensuring due process rights to Internet users.
- Charge the Federal Trade Commission, as an expert body, with
- certifying technologies as suitable for noninfringing use,
- investigating and possibly regulating the use of technical protection measures on creative works to prevent practices that are unfair and deceptive to consumers, and
- analyzing the effects of P2P filesharing on the production and dissemination of cultural works.
Aaron Perzanowski - Competing With Free: Suggestions for Remaining Relevant in the Economy of Ideas
Although judicial decisions and legislative action are likely to play a role in any eventual resolution of the issues created by p2p technology, ultimately competitive market-based solutions represent the content industry’s most realistic hope for stemming the tide of lost revenues attributable to free p2p networks. This paper endeavors first to define the “p2p problem", considering the effects of this technology on content distributors, innovators, and the public. Next it explores the likely success of a range of approaches to dealing with p2p, concluding that the implementation of services capable of “competing with free” offers the greatest likelihood of success. After outlining the features of both current legitimate download services and free p2p networks most attractive to users, I suggest a service that grafts a user-friendly paid service onto p2p
architecture in a manner that preserves p2p’s most critical contributions.
Naveen Sastry - Stealing (From) the Music Industry
The record industry is desperately trying to cope with the spread of peer-to-peer (P2P) systems and salvage its business model. Meanwhile, these same P2P networks present a tremendous opportunity for technology companies to reinvent consumers? relationship with music. I argue that a new business model based on open content can be just as revolutionary for the way society interacts with music as the Internet has become for text. It may prove to be just as lucrative, too. Technologists are best positioned to capitalize on this phenomenon with their unique combination of technical experience, marketing, and vision, and can greatly expand the music market.
If a problem has no solution, it may not be a problem, but a fact ? not to be solved, but to be coped with over time.
?Shimon Peres
Ryan Shaw - Please Remember to Stay Calm: Responding to the Challenge of P2P
In recent years the effective bandwidth for distributing content over the Internet has increased dramatically, due to greater network capacity and new protocols and formats for using this capacity more efficiently. Millions of people around the world have taken advantage of easy-to-use software tools for exploiting this increased bandwidth to exchange music, movies, and other creative works, infringing on the copyright of the creators of those works. As a result, many of our assumptions about copyright and the balance it maintains between the rights of creators and the rights of the public have been called into question. Policymakers have been forced to consider legislation in response to what is perceived by some as a ?copyright crisis.?
When people believe they are in a crisis situation, they tend to act quickly, without carefully investigating the courses of action available to them. As this can be dangerous, emergency response professionals are trained to remind us to stay calm. I would like to offer similar advice to our policymakers.
In Part 1 of this essay, I will consider the question of whether there is, in fact, a copyright crisis, and what the nature of that crisis might be. In Part 2, I will examine some proposed policy solutions which I think should be avoided. Finally, in Part 3, I will make some suggestions about what legislative reforms should be made. Specifically, I outline a plan to ensure a diversity of approaches to and attitudes toward intellectual and cultural products, including approaches and attitudes that do not consider these products to be ?property.? I believe that encouraging a world where a number of different regimes exist side by side will provide the best chances for finding an optimum solution to the puzzles posed by new communications technologies.
Peter Vlastelica -Entrepreneurship, Competition, and Copyright: A Letter to Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS)
Dear Senator Brownback,
I am writing you to discuss a topic that is very important to me: support for creativity in this country. I am not writing you as an artist or even as a supporter of the arts, but as a business person. I am an MBA student at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, focusing on entrepreneurship and digital media. I represent the interests of a number of young entrepreneurs with ideas and passion for innovation in the entertainment industry, a group that finds its ability to create new business models limited by the efforts of the dominant players in the industry to control future innovation by influencing copyright policy. I am concerned because these efforts are economically and culturally shortsighted, as well as anti-competitive. As the chairman of the Commerce Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space, with jurisdiction over technology, innovation, and competitiveness policy, you are in a unique position to encourage a new category of technological growth focused on innovation in the entertainment industry. I encourage you in your proceedings and policy recommendations ? starting with your consideration of P2P file-sharing and digital rights management (DRM) technologies ? to weigh the issues I outline in this letter against the major players? efforts to retain control of the market supply of resources available for supporting creativity and creative individuals.
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