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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.
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.
Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson
13 Aug. 1813Writings 13:333--34
It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." --Marvin the Martian
It looks like BitTorrent may be next on the list. MPAA spokesman declines to say whether the trade group intends to sue Cohen. They'd have a harder time proving that BitTorrent is primarily used for copyright infringement though, due to the many legitimate uses.
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.
I don't think you understand the economics of the situation. When you ask an actual artist whether they think P2P hurts them, you are not guaranteed to get the same answer each time. Many artists don't care or even think it is a good thing, and many artists percieve it as hurting their overall sales. However, if you ask distributors of music and movies the same question, you will get a nearly unanimous answer. Why do you think this is the case?
The issue of copyright infringement is a distribution issue, as you pointed out. The difference now is that certain things can be very easily redistributed at no cost. The reason no one cared about someone copying a book in the past is that it was hard to do it, and in order to do it with any sort of economic impact, you would need to either 1.) employ a lot of people or 2.) have special equipment. On the other hand, it is easy to copy information nowadays. Whether you think copy protection and DRM restrictions are good or bad things, one fact remains true. Both of those things try to impose artificial scarcity on products which are not naturally scarce anymore (read: information, bits and bytes). That is why distributors are so pissed off but artists don't seem to care so much.
P2P networks put distributors in a position in which they can no longer control the supply chains for their products. DRM and copy protection schemes are methods they use to regain this control, but whether they are present or not in a market, the demand for the artist's skill will still be present.
Your argument assumes that the current methods of distribution are the only systems in which artists will be able to subsist. Even if our current distribution scheme goes away, the demand for music, movies, video games, etc will still exist. Artists will still be able to produce and will continue to make money at it, but the distribution system will more than likely not be one that you are used to. There are business models out there that take piracy into account, i.e. the amount of money that a business makes is not dependant on the amount of piracy by definition. Said another way, your argument only makes sense if you assume we have to use the current system or no system at all. That is simply not true.
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.
Please don't confuse law with economics. They don't always go hand in hand. The situation we're dealing with is an economic one, not a legal one. Filesharing networks will not get rid of copyright, and so the first part of your comment has no bearing on the discussion.
Now on to the second part.
First off, if I understand the GPL correctly, it is perfectly legal to redistribute GPL'd software as your own. Many people have done this, including all of the Debian-flavors-of-the-week. Second off (and this is the important point), you've missed the entire point of free software. GPL and BSD-style Free software is meant to be copied. Business models that revolve around free software *assume* that copying *will* and *does* occur on an *hourly* basis. If the makers of free software really feel like the redistribution of their software hurts them, then tell me why they themselves set up and maintain mirrors of their own software.
The fact of the matter is that busines
Light is filtering down from above. Would you like to use DIVE?