Another interesting profile of the year gone by
http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/6002/losers2005.htmlEarlier this year the Record Industry would have topped our winners list with its win in the MGM v Grokster case. As the months passed by it became apparent - no way.
Other than help to pressure some of the commercial P2P applications into closure the ruling has done nothing to abate file sharing, which increased for the umpteenth time this past November. As pundits began to contemplate the potential fallout of the ruling it became apparent that the supposed win in that case can have just the opposite effect of what the content industries expect. It can be used to PROTECT new P2P schemes.
How? According to the Supreme Court services are only liable if they commit "active encouragement" an act that the likes of eDonkey, Grokster and others probably committed in various measures. Here's where it gets interesting. Theoretically, if the creators of any new P2P application never make any statements or take any actions that promote anything other than legal use of their product, they do not violate this standard. All they have to do is be quiet, knowing - wink wink - that file-sharers will use their product in the same manner they use any other file sharing app. This is critical because as the older services change or close up shop users will seek out the new applications. As long as the new services stay well within the bounds of the Active Encouragment test - bounds that haven't been defined yet - they are legal.
This is just a small snippet, but without posting the whole thing here it was the most important to me.
