The Great P2P Debate.
I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been guilty of illegal filesharing in times past. But these days, all of us go through legal channels to get our music. What makes the P2P debate interesting now is not that we necessarily want the filesharing of copyrighted works to become legal. It’s that there are other proven uses for the technology.
I have heard stories from students on college campuses who have been cited by their universities for running BitTorrent clients because, according to the university, BitTorrent is used only for illegal filesharing. But.. upon further investigation, you’ll find that these students were not torrenting the latest Jessica Simpson album, but the latest version of FreeBSD, which is perfectly legal to download in this fashion.
Peer to Peer filesharing is a boon to non-profit organizations such as the BSD Project and the Mozilla Foundation. It spares them from spending a lot of money that they don’t have on expensive bandwidth and anyone who is interested in their products is more than happy to share the love by distributing these quite legal programs using their own bandwidth to do so.
I think we’ll see a similar ruling to Betamax here. Yes, the technology can be used for bad things, but it’s not Grokster’s fault for implementing the technology.. it has a plethora of other legitimate and legal uses as well.
March 30, 2005 3:47 pm 
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By Dave Justus, March 31, 2005 @ 1:29 pm
I am not sure what the exact solution will be, but I expect that our copywrite laws will have to adapt in some way to deal with new technology.
The entertainment lobby is so powerful though that I worry we will not achieve a properly balanced solution for some time.
By Random Gemini, March 31, 2005 @ 2:06 pm
Copyright is muddy right now because the entertainment lobby is muddying the water.
I think that the old copyright laws were fine, and that they applied to new techonology. They applied to all things that could be considered intellectual property.
They just weren’t good enough for the entertainment industry. They wanted something nastier, something harsher that defended their interests without stopping to consider the interests of others who hold intellectual property rights (copyright) in this realm of new technology. I’m really concerned that they’ll get it, but I am hoping that they won’t.
By Dave Justus, April 1, 2005 @ 7:43 am
Technology has changed which has made illegal behavior easier.
Every time in the past that this has happened the laws have changed as well, sometimes reletively dramatically, sometimes less so. I think we do need a change in the laws to maintain balance between the interests of creators and consumers.
I highly recommend Larry Lessig’s Free Culture book as a good resource on this topic. You can download a PDF for free on the site or buy a copy from Amazon.
By Random Gemini, April 2, 2005 @ 1:09 pm
What you’ve said is true. It is easier to copy intellectual property these days.
I’ll pick up a copy of his book as soon as I can. Thanks for the link!