Supreme Court takes hard look at P2P

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A few facts....

I'm going to play devil's advocate here. Not that I like what the RIAA is doing, but like I always say, facts are facts, you can't argue with them:

1. The RIAA *legally* owns the files being swapped by millions on a daily basis. Whether we like it or not, they have the right to fight for their property. If you disagree with this simple fact, you should move to Antarctica which I think is the only place left on earth with no property rigths.

2. Grokster and the rest of the "file sharing" networks are NOT in the same category as other well established companies. A very common defense goes like this: "Company X markets this product/service which can be used for illegal purposes, and they are not liable for that, so why pick on Grokster?". The products/services most often mentioned are guns, cars, the post office and telephones. Guns are in a class by itself, so for the sake of brevity, let's keep them out of the argument. For the others, it's easy to see why the analogy doesn't work: the vast majority of people using those products/services are not engaged in any illegal activity (for example, there are about 100 million cars in the US, even if you count all drunk drivers, at most 2% of those cars are used for criminal activities). File sharing networks, on the other hand, depend 100% on illegal downloading. If they can prove that a good portion of their traffic is dedicated to *legal* file sharing, they have a case (and I'd be surprised), but I seriously doubt even 5% of that traffic involves non-copyrighted material.

3. Just because there is no law that makes an activity illegal doesn't mean that activity should be tolerated.

So, it all comes down to this: The RIAA has the right to do what they are doing and the file sharing networks are not the innocent victims they claim to be.

Posted by: cicuta   Posted on: 03/29/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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