Mark Cuban to fund Grokster vs. MGM case.

Deadric writes "According to Mark Cuban's latest blog entry, he will help fund the Grokster vs. MGM case, which threatens to destroy the Betamax shield."

Comments

Mark Cuban

[Wizy]

You can see what he has done in nearly every business he has run. He has made it work, made it run smooth and gotten a lot of money for it when he sold it off. He took the mavericks and made them into a contending team instead of a team that never had a chance of making the playoffs let alone winning anything.

Its nice to see him getting in on this. He might be goofy and really into himself, but he is good at winning.

The "Betamax shield" may not fit anyway.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

The Betamax shield doesn't necessarily fit the circumstances. With the analog VCR tech, there are generational losses and the machines aren't conducive to easy affordable mass-distribution because of their 1x record rates. One reason SCOTUS gave Betamax their blessings was that people at the time weren't trying to build libraries of videos, but rather watch TV shows at a more convenient time, but my impression of P2P users is that they are trying to build libraries, and of material that wasn't necessarily licenced for broadcast anyway. Even when the material was licenced for broadcast, the ads are often removed.

With P2P, there are no generational losses and it doesn't require any money other than a working computer and an internet connection to distribute as many infringing copies as the user likes.

Kitchen knives

[Alain Williams]

I don't know about the USA, but in England it has long been held that a manufacturer of a kitchen knife cannot be held responsible for a murder carried out using the knife.

Same argument applies to the whole internet, too.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

P2P networks are copyright neutral -- anything can go over the network.

Note that the same applies to the Internet itself, and to a plethora of its components: Routers, TCP, FTP, cabling, webservers, etc.

There is good reason to believe that a vast majority of the traffic on the Internet is "pirated" copyrighted material. If the movie, music, and broadcast industry conglomerates can use a "mostly used for piracy" argument to shut down one application or one protocol, they can use the same argument to shut down ANY or ALL of them.

The entertainment conglomerates would LOVE to have the Internet go away. (Some of them even flamed it systematically as it was catching on. Some of them still do.) It pulls eyeballs from their products and is thus perceived as cutting into their revenue.

Remember that the Internet itself was designed as a peer-to-peer system - an interconnection of a vast network of endpoints that exchange information. The perception of it as a client-server, vendor-customer network (like, say, a broadcast medium) is an illusion, created by three factors:
- The enormous success of a few client-server apps, such as the web, (where the servers are usually run by a corp or institution),
- the rise of ISPs (with terms of service discouraging consumer-grade customers from hosting servers), and
- the shortage of IPv4 address (leading to workarounds such as dynamic address allocation and NAT, which also impeed hosting a server on a consumer-grade connection).