Wednesday, March 30, 2005

ny times on grokster: The NY Times ran an editorial on the Grokster arguments before the Supreme Court. amazingly bad ... I bet the MPAA and RIAA wrote it. (Via tingilinde.) It's not surprising that NYT editorial writers are sensitive to the claims of media companies. They too feel as potentially endangered creators of original content. But even if they were less one-sided, the case is subtler than either side allows. The blunt reality is that p2p companies, whatever their claims about substantial non-infringing uses, have built their businesses on the demand for their software from copyright violators. That is very different from Betamax. We need to distinguish here between technology and business model. The technology is neutral, but the way a business profits from it may not be neutral. The empirical questions are: would people buy iPods if there were no infringing MP3s floating around (we know many would); would people download adware-infested p2p software if it were not to exchange infringing MP3s (we know the answer to this one, too). 9:34:37 AM