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Grokster Case Aftermath: Busy times Ahead for EFF
Tractorjector writes "Mad Penguin has published part two of their MGM vs Grokster interview series (the first part was featured on Slashdot on 2005-06-27). This time the focus is on EFF Director Shari Steele. A very compelling (and somewhat concerning) interview."
The basic point of the ruling is that you need to be able to have plausible deniability when it comes to promoting illegal actions.
Bitorrent, for example, is able to get away with aiding mass piracy because the primary use for it is to disseminate large binary files. Those files can be anything, but one major use of bitorrent is to ease the spread of Linux distributions and other Open Source binaries.
Grokster (and its workalikes) is designed, advertised, and used as a way of illegally distributing copyrighted materials. The court just found that if you run a service designed to help people break the law that you will have some amount of responsibility in the acts.
I'm not saying that I think that "bullet makers" should be held responsible for the actions of a select few of their customers, but I do think that there is a certain amount of discretion that companies riding the razor's edge ought to employ.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
We need broad public, and congressional pressure .. not judicial rulings. Remember judicial rulings can be overruled by constitutional amendments and other means such as judge replacements etc.
A long term, permanent solution requires informing and winning the public.
I'd agree that the OSS community does need to shun piracy. OTOH I think people take things that Richard Stallman says, that software should be free, and try to equate that with "they want to steal stuff." That M$ would profit from piracy I think has long been established. Accusations like this were made years ago concerning usage in Central America. It was believed that M$ had let a dependence on Windows grow then cried fowl on piracy. It's a very effective tactic that has been used for ages by other sordid groups. Now it seems to be the modus operondi in East Asia.
You have the right idea, but you seem to be buying in to some unfortunate memes that really should be scotched: "plausible deniability", "promoting illegal actions", "get away with aiding mass piracy"... Bittorrent is promoting legal actions, it's aiding the distribution of software, it doesn't need to "deny" anything. The problem is that there's a limited amount of bandwidth, the solution is a Usenet-style store-and-forward distribution system.
If Bittorrent had come first, and these systems had started out like Usenet as a way for people to share information (discussion boards, open source software, and so on) nobody at the EFF would dream of defending Grokster on the grounds that they're only making their money from "arms length" piracy, just like nobody sane would call an ISP a censor for refusing to carry alt.binaries.warez.
There's nothing new about peer-to-peer networks. The Internet is a peer-to-peer network. Usenet, UUCP, Fidonet, peer-to-peer networking has been the nerve fibers of the community that slashdot is part of since long before the Internet has been available to carry its traffic.
So it's a damn shame that Napster and its successors were created to take advantage of the limited anonymity of peer-to-peer networking rather than its bandwidth-accelerating capabilities... to uise the technology as a cut-out so they could make money from mass copyright violations rather than sharing legal material. Because they may have ended up poisoning the well for good, given the way even defenders of systems like Bittorrent are using this kind of language.
The Grokster decision was Good.
The ED of the EFF wants to stir up the masses and make us skeered the gummint gonna take away our P2P by letting the RIAA sue anyone who writes a P2P program or runs a peer-based download service.
People who advertise a tool expressly for its illegal purposes were already liable for those eventual uses. The Grokster case merely, and rightly, applied that old-as-the-hills principle to file-sharing services.
EFF is fearmongering for donations.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Linux has lower penetration in areas of high piracy because people who just want a free operating system rip off Windows instead of using Linux. How does that contribute profit to MS?
It means that the people who are now stealing Windows, in five years, or ten, whenever they are better off and have their own assets at risk and their own wealth to protect and when the price of Windows is something they can afford, they will be familiar with Windows and be more likely to buy Windows than to switch to Linux.
This has been a tremendously valuable tool for Microsoft over the years, in the US and abroad. Combined with their proprietary file formats it's helped them keep the market for competitors to Office down... someone who can't afford Office is a potential market for a $50 word processor, except that it's easier to "borrow" Office from the office... so there's no low-cost competition to Office any more and even free software has a rough ride.
I suspect that's one reason they didn't put any effective copy protection in Windows prior to XP. Once they had the market penetration, they could go wild.
I oppose piracy not because it harms big companies, but because it helps them.
The same thing is true for music. There are some tremendous musicians out there doing amazing work, and promoting themselves through free music and listings on MP3blogs like 3hive. They're hurt by Grokster, because a huge chunk of their potential market is swallowed up by the P2P networks. I suspect that if the networks did go down, the labels would just find themselves facing a whole new threat from independants who are right now taking a bigger hit from P2P than the labels are.
EFF has never won any significant legal battle it has taken on. In fact, some of the cases the EFF fought most heavily have been lost in a manner that substantially weakens the EFF positions.
You mean like the broadcast flag?