Grokster and the Supreme Court: A Mom’s View
We Can’t Argue for Technological Innovation at the Expense of Values
Published: April, 2005
It’s time for parents to ask the high tech industry to stop hiding behind the argument that technology must march on at all costs. It’s time to ask them once again to play their part in raising our children to value intellectual and physical property.
As a mother and a technology spokesperson, the Grokster case that’s currently being argued before the Supreme Court puts me in a no-win position.
I can either be seen as a forward thinker by my high tech peers or as a Mom who teaches her kids to respect property. I don’t like the choice and I’d urge the courts not to enact a law, but rather to use their influence to force Grokster and others like it to act like socially responsible businesses.
In order to understand how much is at stake you need to understand a bit of techno-legal history. In 1984, when SONY’s Betamax (a videocassette recorder that allowed you to record a TV program for later use) first came onto the scene, content creators were afraid of this technology that could potentially let people make illegal copies of movies and television. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of SONY saying that although people could use it illegally to make copies for resale, there was nothing illegal about Betamax. Since Betamax served many legal purposes (like recording to watch at a later time) SONY could continue selling it.
Fast forward to today’s peer to peer networking and you can see why the SONY Betamax case set the precedent. Peer to peer (P2P) networks, which allow you to share files and processing power from one machine to another without the need of a centralized server, have many potential legal uses.
But, despite the legal uses, today most illegal file sharing of copyrighted materials is done over peer to peer networks. Following the Betamax model, Grokster would be allowed to continue making these illegal materials available on its service because the service can also be used for other non-infringing activities..
It’s helpful to think about Grokster as a pipeline. Are the people who create the pipeline responsible for policing what gets piped through it? You bet. Any real world company in the business of “piping things” would be asked to make sure the contents were legal. A water pipe, a sewer pipe, an oil pipe … can you imaging if the owners of those pipelines let anyone put anything through them in order to make an extra buck?
We’ve raised a generation of children who believe that “because it’s on the Internet”, it should be a free-for-all grab bag. It’s a tired way of thinking and it’s heading us down an awful direction. If our kids see the new MOBY song, or the pre-release cut of a new movie on a peer to peer system today, they make it their own without a shred of the guilt they’d have had they stole it from Blockbuster or HMV. Grokster is a storefront with a shingle that says “Take Me. I cost money anywhere else, but here you can get it here for free”.
Technology folks argue that if you ban peer to peer networks like Grokster you are impeding innovation and progress. Please. They are confusing the act of running an honest business with a pompous egocentric argument about stemming the course of innovation.:
If Grokster were forced to behave responsibly and identify, ghettoize and pursue legal action against individuals who used it illegally you better believe that the peer to peer world would clean up quickly.
It’s time to stop confusing technology with the notion of using it responsibly. Using it responsibly means that the people who provide new technology have some obligation to making sure that it’s not being used for harmful, illegal or deceitful purposes.
In Grokster’s case this means they can’t distribute copyrighted materials without permissions. They can’t build a system to deprive a major segment of our society (musicians, moviemakers, and software makers to name a few) the ability to earn a living. Today artists and creators everywhere are getting the short shrift in the name of technology.
The high tech industry should be ashamed of itself for hiding behind constitutional law. Common sense and good business practices should triumph.
This is an industry that’s given us cell phones that can now market to our kids 24×7 and game machines with GPS’s built in to them so that any nut can pinpoint a kid’s whereabouts. They’ve created a generation of rip/burn/share frenzy that’s so intense most kids (and their parents) don’t give a hoot about what’s stealing and what’s not. It’s time that the pipeline bear some of the responsibility for what it carries.
The scariest part? The kids who haven’t bought a single artist’s work but have iPods or hard disks full of illegal content are the same kids we’re seeing coming into the adult workplace. They’ve grown up in a world where no one has educated them on how to use the tools they own.