HELIOLITH

“They told the world that the VCR was to copyright what the boston strangler is to the woman home alone, and predicted that it would be the death of copyright. (source). This is not a new theme. Every time a new technology comes along, those with a vested interest in the old technology first ask the court to ban it…” EFF Attorney Fred von Lohmann

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)won an important battle in court today, in spite of the frantic lobbying by the corporate media gestapo (RIAA*, MPAA, BSA) to destroy p2p (peer to peer) technologies completely, the ruling was unanimous. Grokster and Morpheus were sued by some dozen corporations, headed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (remeber the roaring lion?) Here’s an excerpt of the ruling from EFF themselves:

The Ninth Circuit decision is based in part on the fact that P2P networks have significant non-infringing uses, and that they can help artists earn money. The ruling is similar to the Supreme Court’s decision in the 1984 Betamax case, which determined that Sony was not liable for copyright violations by users of the Betamax VCR.

“Today’s ruling will ultimately be viewed as a victory for copyright owners. As the court recognized today, the entertainment industry has been fighting new technologies for a century, only to learn again and again that these new technologies create new markets and opportunities,” said EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann. “There is no reason to think that file sharing will be any different.”.

Nearly every major technological news source…

that watches the battle against peer to peer (p2p) is carrying this as a lead story. Wired News writes that, “The decision is a blow for record labels and movie studios which sued the peer-to-peer operators claiming that the services should be held liable for the copyright infringement of their users.” Boing Boing Writer Cory Doctorow even came back (to work) from a week on vacation to celebrate! He urges the reader to go download the mp3 (i’m listening to it at the moment in the background). Cory says that, “EFF IP Attorney Fred von Lohmann’s oral argument in the appeal — he was nothing less than brilliant.” Hearing him speak now, I couldn’t agree more.

Tim Wu of the scholarly Lessig Blog swiftly dissects the ruling, and articulates many key points in the case. He mentions the Sony Betamax decision, which held Sony not liable for copyright infringement that customers may engage in with their product. He reports that the court found

…that the P2P filesharing technology in programs like KaZaA falls into the same category as typewriters, photocopiers, VCRs, and pencils. All are tools that whose usage is not supervised by the manufacturer, that can be used for both legitimate and illegitimate purposes.

The audio is remarkable. The judge openly scolds one of the plantiff’s lawyers for using sensationalist terms such as “theft” and “piracy” and tells him that his problem is that he needs to prove that the statutory monopoly granted to his clients (the media giants) applies to this “something new.” It isn’t illegal for example to make a recording of a radio program, and much of the case for Peer to Peer is the concept of “substantial non-infringing use.” Can users, and are users using P2P for legal sharing? Of course they are. The case seemed over to me even before the defendants’ lawyers begin to speak, in an confident, calm, and intelligent voice. He cites the millions of authorized video games, songs, music videos, music by authorized trading of concert recordings, the Bible, the Koran, the Communist Manifesto…” He clearly separates the Napster decision from the current case in court, mostly on the basis that Napster was centralized, and that Grokster and Morpheus do not provide file storage, nor indices of the users’ media.

(sidenote: *the RIAA’s position is so extreme that on their website they claim that, “Pirate recordings …[include] mixed tapes and compilation CDs featuring one or more artists.” Find me a home that loves music, but has no mix tapes or mix cd’s!)