In reply to p2pnet.net: Hollywood vs p2p continued…
Quoting Business Software Alliance (BSA) consultant Richard A. Epstein from Britain’s Financial Times:
Grokster can’t raise even one whiff of the fair use defence that loomed so large in Betamax.
While I’ve not used Grokster, because I am more interested in distributed file storage versus distributed file sharing, I suspect it uses similar P2P concepts that I am advocating.
First, there’s no class of nonobjecting owners of copyrighted material who don’t mind copying.
If I am interpreting this statement correctly, this means that there is no copyrighted material that can be shared. This is absurd. Ever heard of Linux? Mozilla? GNU and its GPL? It’s called copyleft.
Second, there is no advertisements [sic] that can be watched at a different time.
Why not put advertisments on your site where you link to your content on P2P networks? When your users want to download your content, they go to your site and see your ads.
Better yet, you could embed your advertisments directly in your copyrighted work, though that probably wont be appealing to your audience.
And third, this time the content providers, moreover, are right to assume that this new technology won’t open up new revenue streams given that iTunes has already figured out how to tap this segment of the market.
Problem is, the iTMS infastructure is expensive, due to vast amounts of bandwidth wasted sending the same media to multiple users. By eliminating the traditional one-to-many distribution chain, you save yourself money. You can then either incur a larger profit from your existing customers or lower your sale price and get more customers.
If Grokster has some legitimate use, then it can be reconfigured, perhaps with consultation with the content owners, in ways that allow for the legal sharing of data, a critical function that looms larger each passing day.
Any programmer will tell you it is practically impossible to create P2P software, or any technology for that matter, that knows the licensing terms for copyrighted works. To the software, everything is 1s and 0s, nothing more.
In this case, I believe that shutting down Grokster, and leaving everyone else alone, marks the sensible first approximation to the correct solution.
Again, I’m not familiar with Grokster’s archicecture, but I don’t know if that’s possible. It isn’t at least with the Gnutella network.
Perhaps the problem is that these P2P vendors are creating proprietary networks and software. I’d like to see the industries go after Bram Cohen or someone who clearly has had no malicious intent at all.
We, P2P developers, are offering the industries technology that provides infinite distribution of their work, at no cost to them. They can take this and either use it to sell their work at a 100% profit or lower their prices and reach an extremely larger audience.
For the industries to reject this technology is absurd. They can use it for their benifit. 100% profits and lower prices for consumers! Why are they trying to kill the technology that they could instead benifit from? This is exactly like the Sony v. Betamax case. It’s just much more extreme.
