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High Court Agrees to Hear File-Sharing Dispute
stkpogo pastes: "The Supreme Court agreed Friday to consider whether two Internet file-sharing services may be held responsible for their customers' online swapping of copyrighted songs and movies. Justices will review a lower ruling in favor of Grokster Ltd. and StreamCast Networks Inc., which came as a blow to recording companies and movie studios seeking to stop the illegal distribution of their works." Grokster won in the lower courts, but the studios are appealing. This case, when finally decided, will be equivalent to the Betamax case 20 years ago which ensured that VCRs were legal.
The claim is mostly inaccurate because it presupposes that the copying individual would otherwise have bought a copy from the publisher. That is occasionally true, but more often false; and when it is false, the claimed loss does not occur.
The claim is partly misleading because the word "loss" suggests events of a very different nature--events in which something they have is taken away from them. For example, if the bookstore's stock of books were burned, or if the money in the register got torn up, that would really be a "loss." We generally agree it is wrong to do these things to other people. But when your friend avoids the need to buy a copy of a book, the bookstore and the publisher do not lose anything they had. A more fitting description would be that the bookstore and publisher get less income than they might have got. The same consequence can result if your friend decides to play bridge instead of reading a book. In a free market system, no business is entitled to cry "foul" just because a potential customer chooses not to deal with them.
The claim is begging the question because the idea of "loss" is based on the assumption that the publisher "should have" got paid. That is based on the assumption that copyright exists and prohibits individual copying. But that is just the issue at hand: what should copyright cover? If the public decides it can share copies, then the publisher is not entitled to expect to be paid for each copy, and so cannot claim there is a "loss" when it is not. In other words, the "loss" comes from the copyright system; it is not an inherent part of copying. Copying in itself hurts no one.
This case is very different from the Universal v. Sony "Betamax" decision, and we're not doing ourselves a favor by constantly comparing the two.
In the Betamax case, the central issue was over whether using the technology of a VCR to timeshift broadcast programs violated the copyright law, and the court said it wasn't a violation. If it was a violation, using a VCR to record TV would be illegal, and Sony and other VCR makers would be making devices that would have a primarily use that was illegal.
In this case, however, there's no question about whether the use of the technology is legal. Using P2P to upload and download copyrighted works without the copyright owner's permission is illegal. The question is over liabilty... is Grokster liable because people are using their software for an illegal use, when the software can both be used for legal and illegal files.
What's at stake here isn't the legality of P2P, but a dangerous question for software writers. Are the makers of software liable for what their users do with the software? So far they're not and hopefully it's going to stay that way.
but are phone companies responsable if you use a phone line to commit a crime? Are car and gun compagnies responsable if you rob a bank with a gun and use a car to get away? It's hard to prove that filesharing networks are solely there to exchange copyrighted materials and nothing else.
One thing I almost never hear in conjunction with the controversy on the record labels losing money due to decreased CD sales is the fact that the economy began to go downhill at around the same time that the CD sales began to fall. True, this coincidentally was also the time when file sharing became popular, but I should think that the bursting of the economic bubble would have more to do with the losses. CDs are a luxury item, basically, and when people have fewer discretionary dollars (as what happens when the economy goes sour) they quit buying as many luxury items. When the economy is up, people might just go out and buy that new CD even though there's probably only two or three good songs on it. When the economy is down, it has to be a damn good album or a person's favorite artist to get that CD sold. Upscale stores saw hits in 2001 (blamed on the economy), upscale restaurants saw hits in 2001 (blamed on the economy), and record companies saw hits in 2001 (not blamed on the economy). The logic doesn't follow.
Copying hurts everyone, only just a little.
The intent of copyright is to encourage progress in the arts and sciences by extending to creators of a work the right to control its distribution. This is no different today than it was in times past.
There was no way to physically control copying of a book 200 years ago. No one really cared whether their copy of a book was from the rightful publisher, unless the spelling were bad or something.
Your logic is accurate, but it misses the point completely because you're fighting a straw argument. Copyright is not intended merely to pay people for work they've created. It's intended encourage people to produce works in the hopes that they may profit, and to support them while they are producing more.
In the classic example, Daniel Webster supported his family for 20 years on the proceeds from his speller while he compiled his famous dictionary. In publishing a dictionary, he inspired and aided countless writers and publishers. Probably you and I would not be reading /. were it not for those two works; in fact, they were so important to the early American educational system that without them we might not be reading English.
But forget money for a second and think about Free software. Suppose it were no longer against the law to copy people's creative work however you wanted. Why, you could download a bunch of source code and put your own name on it. Wow, the AC Compiler. AC Linux. AC UNIX. AC Office.Org. And so on.
What would the authors of those packages do? They'd quit writing Free software, that's what. Would *you* write something for someone else to claim? I wouldn't.
And the musicians whose songs you think you have a right to copy would quit recording and get real jobs. Authors would quit writing, sculptors would no longer sculpt, except in their spare time away from those meaningful jobs at Kroger and General Electric.
And the world would be a gray, dull, unamusing place.
Copying without due recompense eventually hurts us all.
sigs, as if you care.