This is really the crux of the issue and a possible way out for Napster. Really, they don't need to stop the piracy -- they just need to transfer all liability from themselves to the pirates, and what better way to do that than to require an explicit action on the part of the pirate to move from legal activity to illegal activity.
If they host a system whose primary advertised use is a directory service for the trading of files, and a subset of users independently devise an encryption scheme for their titles which Napster does not natively support, than Napster becomes no more liable than IRC.
Now the author can sue napster (and the RIAA) for illegal restraint of trade
Napster is a privately-owned service. Despite the legal wranglings and the much argued right NOT to be distributed, there is certainly no automatic right TO be distributed. No law prevents Napster from restraining your trade on Napster servers.
Really, I don't see how Napster has any liability to the willing participants at all since the service is free
The problem is not "society changing its collective mind and deciding we don't need privacy any more", but rather individual agents or bureaucrats deciding that it's so much more efficient to quietly invade privacy than to pursue normal noisy channels of investigation. Once we've given up our privacy (trusting each other not to abuse it) there's no way to get it back if the game suddenly changes.
And really, no matter how much our society values privacy, there will always be individuals willing to trample it. Most likely the first abuses will rise from very noble intentions ("Lo-Jack for kids! Never worry about losing your child again! If he's kidnapped, Lo-Jack will recover him within 45 minutes!"), but how easy it would be for a small group of people to build on that complacency and take it to the next level.
While we shouldn't panic and reject all such advances out of hand, we'd do well to subject each to a healthy dose of public deliberation before handing over another nugget of liberty.
Re: AC asks "Will people want to bring a non-clone into the world to compete with the Einstein clones?"
If cloning were cheap, this might be a problem, but I suspect that:
A) Cloning will be expensive enough that only the rich or frustrated are going to opt for it
B) People are egotistical enough to want to propagate their own genes, not just copy someone else's (or adoption would be way more popular)
C) The effects of A & B multiply -- i.e. wealth and success will probably make someone more likely to want to propagate his own genes than someone else's. And really, even if he chooses to clone himself, that's not that much worse than normal reproduction -- just sets it back a generation in his case.
One market I see developing is Gattaca-esque half-cloning, where you go to a clinic and they splice your own chromosones with some from the cloning catalog. That kind of genetic tinkering is likely to be much more appealing to self-important people than straight-out cloning -- i.e. "Let's take the best parts of me and add in the best parts of Stephen Hawking and see what we get from THAT."
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This is really the crux of the issue and a possible way out for Napster. Really, they don't need to stop the piracy -- they just need to transfer all liability from themselves to the pirates, and what better way to do that than to require an explicit action on the part of the pirate to move from legal activity to illegal activity.
If they host a system whose primary advertised use is a directory service for the trading of files, and a subset of users independently devise an encryption scheme for their titles which Napster does not natively support, than Napster becomes no more liable than IRC.
Now the author can sue napster (and the RIAA) for illegal restraint of trade
Napster is a privately-owned service. Despite the legal wranglings and the much argued right NOT to be distributed, there is certainly no automatic right TO be distributed. No law prevents Napster from restraining your trade on Napster servers.
Really, I don't see how Napster has any liability to the willing participants at all since the service is free
The problem is not "society changing its collective mind and deciding we don't need privacy any more", but rather individual agents or bureaucrats deciding that it's so much more efficient to quietly invade privacy than to pursue normal noisy channels of investigation. Once we've given up our privacy (trusting each other not to abuse it) there's no way to get it back if the game suddenly changes.
And really, no matter how much our society values privacy, there will always be individuals willing to trample it. Most likely the first abuses will rise from very noble intentions ("Lo-Jack for kids! Never worry about losing your child again! If he's kidnapped, Lo-Jack will recover him within 45 minutes!"), but how easy it would be for a small group of people to build on that complacency and take it to the next level.
While we shouldn't panic and reject all such advances out of hand, we'd do well to subject each to a healthy dose of public deliberation before handing over another nugget of liberty.
Re: AC asks "Will people want to bring a non-clone into the world to compete with the Einstein clones?"
If cloning were cheap, this might be a problem, but I suspect that:
A) Cloning will be expensive enough that only the rich or frustrated are going to opt for it
B) People are egotistical enough to want to propagate their own genes, not just copy someone else's (or adoption would be way more popular)
C) The effects of A & B multiply -- i.e. wealth and success will probably make someone more likely to want to propagate his own genes than someone else's. And really, even if he chooses to clone himself, that's not that much worse than normal reproduction -- just sets it back a generation in his case.
One market I see developing is Gattaca-esque half-cloning, where you go to a clinic and they splice your own chromosones with some from the cloning catalog. That kind of genetic tinkering is likely to be much more appealing to self-important people than straight-out cloning -- i.e. "Let's take the best parts of me and add in the best parts of Stephen Hawking and see what we get from THAT."
Think about what would have happened if ThinkGeek had tried to use a one-click system, or FatBrain.
You mean "FatBrain, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Barnes & Noble.com"?
(I was surprised to learn that, myself, but it's true -- we're yet another step closer to Microbarnesandibmcdonaldsmorris!)
Of course, I just want a 12ft x 9ft display wall in my living room -- now THAT would be worth 20K.