When Should Internet Providers be Liable for Copyright Infringement?

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At the Music Tech Summit in San Francisco last month, John Perry Barlow, Co-Founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and former Grateful Dead songwriter, responded to a question posed by Bob Weir, also of the Grateful Dead, about the distribution of music on the Internet as follows:

“We just have to get the property model out of the picture.  It is not a good way to monetize something that can be infinitely duplicated at zero cost and infinitely distributed at zero cost.”

Mr. Barlow ignores the costs involved in providing the distribution systems that make torrent sites and P2P networks possible, and the profits being made by the Internet Service Providers (ISPs), search engines and ad networks who provide that access.  Verizon invested $23 Billion (or $4,000 per subscriber) to build its super-high-speed FiOS network.  Google spends as much as a billion dollars a quarter on infrastructure and made $14 billion in profit over the last twelve months.  Further, more than 85 million broadband Internet subscribers in the United States pay an average of $41 a month for service, totaling $42 billion annually.  The EFF doesn’t insist that ISPs and search engines forego the profits from their investments, so why should content creators and owners be forced to do so?

Forbes Discussion Peice