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Opening Salvo Filed In MGM v. Grokster
Aire Libre writes "The first brief on the merits before the Supreme Court in MGM Studios v. Grokster was filed Friday (January 21, 2004) by the Video Software Dealers Association. The brief suggests that while p2p systems may be used for infringing and noninfringing uses, courts should consider whether technologies may be used to reduce infringing uses without over-burdening the system provider, freedom of speech for non-infringing uses (including by copyright owners who want p2p systems to be used to reach their audiences) or freedom of competition (including first sale doctrine principles, and competition in providing all intermediate software and services). Bringing a retailer perspective, it strikes a balance of respect for copyright and respect for the limits of those copyrights. The brief is available here (in PDF)."
Can you take away rights of the innocent in order to prevent illegal actions? To me... outlawing p2p (which on its own is legal) to stop illegal file transfers is like outlawing driving cars in order to stop people from speeding.
While MGM's position may be "balanced", there's always one thing that irks me about DRM: it makes it impossible to use in the public domain later.
The very least a movie/music/software company must do to gain my approval is to deposit their materials to the Library of Congress unencumbered and DRM-free.
Copyright is supposed to let creators make money on their work for a limited time in exchange for making it freely available later.
Obligatory Disclaimer: IANAL
While I agree for the most part with what you're saying, I don't think the dns system qualifies as p2p. At least not any more than the www does. DNS requests work by disecting the hostname in question piece by piece. For example, www.slashdot.org. I dns query for this by joe user would start by querying the dns server (which is just a cache mainly) of their isp. This dns server would in turn query one of the root name servers (or whoever owns .org) for the dns server that controls slashdot.org. The isp dns server would then query the dns server that controls slashdot.org, and ask it if it knows the ip address for www.slashdot.org. Slashdot can either answer with an ip address or refer it to yet another dns server.
This chain of events does not really seem at all like a p2p app. Sorry.
> should consider whether technologies may be used to reduce infringing uses without over-burdening the system provider
This is an impossible goal. Here's why:
Every automated solution for reducing copyright infringement over P2P has always had one thing in common: sniffing and filtering data at some level.
Every data-sniffing solution has one of two basic architectural directions: centralized or distributed. If you pursue the centralized direction, you will rapidly encounter enormous scaling problems. If you pursue the distributed direction, you will rapidly encounter enormous management problems.
These difficulties are tremendously compounded by the fact that neither the P2P developers, the ISPs, nor their customers have any natural incentive for doing any of this. The "incentive" can come only from the heavy fist of the law.
The natural reluctance to deploy these unwanted, legally-mandated solutions will inevitably result in a "swiss cheese" environment. We know from past experience that massive numbers of people can learn very quickly where the holes are in the swiss chesse that allow them unfiltered access to the content they seek.
And that's the best case scenario. A more realistic scenario will be something like a repeat of SDMI, which failed so miserably that the public wasn't even mildly inconvenienced by it.