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12.13.2004
Grokster Seminar
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PFF held a lunch seminar up on Capitol Hill on the Grokster case last Friday. There was a certain dramatic flourish about halfway through when someone announced that the Supreme Court's order granting cert had just been issued.
A most interesting feature of the session was what was not said. No one, on the panel or in the audience, put forward the copyleft idea that untrammeled distribution of copyrighted material is a good thing and that we should rely on "new business models," or on a tax on connectivity and hardware to create a fund that can be allocated among creators by a government board.
This is progress. The suggestion that a system of socialized IP could work is even madder than the dreams of a socialized utopia in the production of physical goods. And the "new business models" rhetoric hits the rock that no new model is workable in the absence of enforceable property rights.
For example, a subscription service of all the music you want for, say, $10 per month? Fine -- for the two minutes it takes until the first subscriber begins transferring it to all the people who did not pay the fee.
There is no proposed business model that does not quickly lead back to where we are now, which is that it is imperative to protect property rights in creativity.
Of course, as PFF argued in its amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to take cert, it is also imperative to protect the process of technological innovation.
So good luck to you, Supreme Court, as you figure out how to reconcile these two imperatives.
posted by James DeLong : 12/13/2004 09:09:38 AM
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