The Grokster Supreme Court case is looming — this is the case where the entertainment companies are trying to overturn their total, crushing defeat at the hands of EFF law-ninja Fred von Lohmann, who got the Ninth Circuit to see that P2P networks are legal and shouldn't have to be designed to censor their users just in case they're infringing copyright.
Groups on both sides of the fence are filing their briefs now for what will be the defining moment for Internet freedom. It's exhilarating reading, and Ed Felten has already begun to critique the other side's filings.
This history could hardly be more wrong. The ability to share files between any two computers on the network was an explicit goal of the Internet, from day one. The web is not a traditional aspect of the Internet, but a relatively recent development. And the web does not require or allow only large, centralized servers. Anybody can have a website — I have at least three. Searching for files and retrieving copies of files is a pretty good description of what the web does today.
What the Solitor General seems to want, really, is a net that is easier to regulate, a net that is more like broadcast, where content is dispensed from central servers.
The anti-porn amici come right out and say that that is what they want. Their brief uses some odd constructions ("Like any non-sentient, non-judgmental technology, peer-to-peer technology can be misused…") and frequent recourse to the network fallacy.
Their main criticism of Grokster is for its "engineered ignorance of use and content" (p. 9; note that the quoted phrase is a reasonable definition of the end-to-end principle, which underlies much of the Internet's design), for failing to register its users and monitor their activities (e.g., p. 13), for failing to limit itself to sharing only MP3 files as Napster did (really! p. 17), and for "engineer[ing] anonymous, decentralized, unsupervised, and unfiltered networks" (p. 18).
Link to Felten criticism, Link to EFF dump for incoming briefs, Link to RSS feed for briefs
(via Copyfight)
