Sarah

(P.S., hilarious line: “File-swapping sounds like wife-swapping”!)

Look at the problem the way an economist looks at it. Because the marginal costs of producing one more copy of an album, one software package or one pill is zero, you will find that piracy or claims “in the public interest” increase. After development costs for software, drugs or digital music or film are met, the costs for distribution are zero. The internet extenuates this problem (even for drugs). Government using the tools of property rights law extends the value of these products far beyond what’s economically viable so that firms or artists can extract rents. These are powerful incentives to create. Otherwise we would have few new products.
Drugs are the perfect analog to this. (Isn’t Brazil — and India for that matter — allowing its citizens/firms to reverse engineer drug therapies? That’s definitely analogous.

I hope I was able to explain my original post.

Cheers

If deemed ‘illegal’ in the USA, what of peer-to-peer software entities operating outside the USA, in countries that do not have the same regulations?

Can the internet be regulated from a technical standpoint without blocking other information?

Free Mickey Mouse now!

*The artistic urge is to share with as many as possible
* The commercial urge is to restrict access (to preserve monetary value)

The general public will always be compelled by the first much more than the second.

“In Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution, the Founding Fathers operating without knowledge of Internet time and recognizing the powerful incentives created by copyrights and patents, granted exclusivity to authors and inventors. Peer-to-peer contradicts this carefully mapped out plan. Copyrights, themselves a product of compromise between producer and consumer, need to mature in the digital age; they need the equivalent of a software update. Peer-to-peer enthusiasts need to understand what they are restoring before they destroy it. ”

The main challenge of our time is how to find the right balance between incentives and openness, between authorial soveriegnty and sharing in the public interest. The world in which information needs to be free needs to find an optimal point on something akin to the Laffer Curve. Like most slippery questions, we are faced with: “How do we get there?” And it’s not just creative matter; it’s also drugs and software that continue this conundrum.

I also find it interesting that the Supreme Court allowed the “Ten Commandments” monuments from the DeMille era– as they were not religious, but for a much more acceptable purpose: they were for marketing the movie.

As for Grokster, I leave the commentary to the pundits… and I hope someone posts here with some more piercing insight.