MORE COMMENTARIES ON SUPREME COURT GROKSTER RULING
UPDATED 6/28 @ 5AM
From Bob Lefsetz / The Lefsetz Letter: "…If you think the Grokster decision is a referendum on P2P, you just haven’t read it. Rather, it’s a referendum on SCUMBAGS!"
"That’s what Grokster and Streamcast are. Shawn Fanning was eager to create a system for people to acquire music. Grokster and Streamcast just wanted to sell advertising…"
"The problem with the major labels is they equated the illegal behavior with the technology. The court in the Napster case did NOT say it was illegal to distribute songs via P2P networks, just that you couldn’t do it without a LICENSE! So, armed with this ruling, you’d think the labels would establish LICENSED P2P. But NO!! They believed they’d stopped the future, and could confidently retreat into the past. And if there WAS any further distribution of music online, it was going to be on THEIR terms. You could either RENT IT, or…
‘Well, that’s ALL they wanted to do until Roger Ames met with Steve Jobs and bullied Universal into licensing the iTunes Music Store before suing file-traders…"
"…The lesson of Grokster is NEXT TIME there’s a technological breakthrough, don’t try to sue it into submission, rather, MONETIZE IT! But, throughout history old, decaying empires fight to hold on to what they possess rather than enter a scary, unclear future…"
From former RIAA head Hillary Rosen for the Huffington Post: "Wow. We won big. Unanimous. That doesn’t happen very often…For today, I hope all sides will take a deep breath and realize that this Supreme Court decision doesn’t change one bit their responsibility to move forward together on behalf of their consumer."
And written just prior to the decision: "So why won’t this case matter now in the marketplace? Because by now SEVERAL HUNDRED MILLION copies of this software that the entertainment industry would like to vanquish have been downloaded to individual computers around the world. They go by names like Grokser, Morpheus, Limewire, eDonkey, Bit Torrent, Kazaa, etc.) And each time, there is a successful enforcement or a new way to catch the developers with copyright liability, they reinvent themselves and generate another two or three year court proceeding. And now, a majority of them are hosted outside the United States. There is no court ruling whose enforcement can keep up with this…"
From DigitalMusicNews.com – Resnikoff’s Parting Shot: Grokster Bites the Dust, Sony Betamax Intact "The Supreme Court ruling in MGM v. Grokster puts both Grokster and SteamCast Networks in the hot seat, with both found to be blatantly encouraging copyright infringement… But the court left Sony Betamax intact, focusing instead on whether the P2P firms in question intended and encouraged copyright violations…That makes the victory a qualified one, and another chapter in the battle between content owners and technology firms. For the technology industry, the decision is fairly targeted towards file-sharing firms, with technologies like the iPod able to defend against accusations of knowingly contributing to infringement (despite evidence of heavy use of the devices for housing illegally-obtained tracks)…"
