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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.
From TFA:
We also look at the effect of piracy and ask whether piracy can ever be beneficial to Microsoft. This extension was motivated by analyzing data on a cross-section of countries on Linux penetration and piracy rates. We found that in countries where piracy is highest, Linux has the lowest penetration rate.
I have an idea then: why don't they make Linux insanely expensive, put it on a CD with a small manual that has a shiny Tux hologram on it, require the user to read a long boring EULA and enter a very long serial number, then have the Linux box display a Teletubbies-like background and make it contact an activation server at www.kernel.org? That way, pirates will just jump on it, distribute it like there's no tomorrow on P2P, and Linux will eventually displace Windows.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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.
http://management.silicon.com/government/0,3902467 7,39145066,00.htm e d_for_newsnight/ 0 588,00.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/04/brit_sack
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,152
Am I the only person on the planet who finds that the EFF's director's name Shari Steele (Share & Steal) is ironic?
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.