SCOTUS Position

Lots of reports today on the oral arguments for MGM vs. Grokster. Tim Armstrong has a detailed overview with lots of juicy legal analysis. This Wired article doesn’t add much, but does contain one cute anecdote:

Songwriter Lamont Dozier, who wrote the Supremes’ hit “Stop! In the Name of Love,” said he wanted to ask the Supreme Court to “stop (illegal file sharing) in the name of creativity.”

Very catchy. Where do I get the deep house remix?

The best article is a sardonic take on the proceedings by the Media Access Project’s Harold Feld. (Via Boing Boing, but then I think all of these might be. Boing Boing has Groksteritis right now.) It’s pretty long, so I’ve whittled it down to two essential quotes. On Chief Justice Rehnquist:

O.K., it’s not nice to make fun of people recovering from thyroid cancer. But it was still funny to hear the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court speak into the microphone with this Darth Vaderish wheeze and say things like “Will our decision release Grokster all over the world?” I swear, he could have thrown in a manical laugh and it would not have been out of place.

Mean and funny. I like it. And on Justice Sandra Day O’Connor:

Again, the Court was skeptical. “If our standard was so clear” asked O’connor, “why did we need to go on for 13 pages after we wrote the sentence you site?” (”Because you talk too much, Bitch” was probably the wrong answer here, so good thing I wasn’t arguing.)

Good thing? God no! I would have given my left nut pinky to hear that exchange.

There is actually considerably more substance to the piece than these quotes might imply. Feld concludes:

Bottom line on Grokster: I think the Court is likely to affirm the basic idea of _Sony_ that you can’t sue a manufacturer or distributor of a technology for copyright infringement if the technology has non-infringing uses. But I also think they will remand and allow the RIAA to pursue a claim for “active inducement” to infringe based on Grokster’s conduct.

Sounds about right to me (not that I have any qualifications whatsoever to make this judgement). The Court is not going to ban P2P. This seems clear from any number of the justices’ remarks, as recounted in these summaries. At the same time, I have very little sympathy for the Groksters, Streamcasts and Sharmans of this world. I suppose they deserve kudos for giving the music industry a much-needed kick in the groin. But let’s face it, with their user bases in the millions, all of these companies have long had the perfect platform for launching any number of innovative P2P services that would have actually contributed something substantial to the state of the art, as well as cementing the notion that there are plenty of non-infringing uses for P2P.

Instead they’ve sat on their laurels milking their dodgy business models for all they’re worth, without inventing or creating anything whatsoever. Without even trying. And you’d have to be pretty disingenuous to deny that they’re guilty of “active inducement”. P2P will live on, but these guys deserve to get their comeuppance.

Bookmark to:

No Comments »

No comments yet.

Trackback URL RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>