Writer Jay Currie suggests that Grokster provides The File Sharer's Guide to the Universe -- a roadmap for operating unauthorized P2P services that stay within the bounds of legality.

He reaches the grim conclusion that:

Technologies like Bit Torrent combined with broadband means it is a snap to find and download, largely anonymously, whole albums, television episodes and movies. If the copyright holders cannot shut down the inventors of these technologies, and Grokster seems to mean they can't, another model for paying the creators is going to have to be found. Collective licensing or a media levy would seem to be it.

If he is right; the future will be grim indeed, because "collective licensing or a media levy" is a euphemism for turning creativity into a socialist gulag.

But I am more hopeful. Technology giveth as well as taketh away, and a combination of improved DRM, evolving systems of micropayments, and self-help measures designed to frustrate the pirates -- reinforced by a clear legal doctrine that interfering with creators' efforts to defend themselves is ipso facto evidence of evil intent -- can yet save the day.

But it is going to be crucially important that creators be allowed to defend themselves -- to put up the Internet equivalent of barbed wire fences and patrol them -- and there will be strong pressure in the Congress to prevent this, applied by the academic abstractionists and free culturists.

posted by James DeLong @ 8:42 AM | Internet: P2P, Search Engines...

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