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March 1, 2005
Venture Capital Speaks
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Venture capital association brief [PDF] in MGM v. Grokster:
It is critical to understand that the threat of secondary liability from copyright suits is qualitatively different from most other sorts of business risk that investors can insure against or built into their risk calculations. The mandatory mechanism of statutory damages -- designed to discourage direct infringement -- has crushing implications for vendors of multi-purpose technologies, where damages from unforeseen users can quickly mount in the millions and even billions of dollars. ...Grokster and StreamCast are just stalking horses for the real targets of the Motion Picture Studios and the Recording Companies. They want to force fundamental, and hugely expensive, changes in the software and hardware that constitutes the Internet, by imposing an obligation on providers to design and engineer their systems to block unauthorized file sharing. Such an open-ended standard of liability would be a proverbial Pandora's box.
Via
Fred von Lohmann @ Deep Links.
Comments (1)
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1. Neo on March 1, 2005 11:14 PM writes...
Yeah -- they might use the huge, uninsurable risks not just as a way to actually generate yet more revenue for zero work, but also to hold the tech sector ransom. They'll tell every company there's basically no way they can avoid potential trilion-dollar lawsuits and certain bankruptcy save if the RIAA chooses not to sue them, and here's how to keep us friendly-like, pat-pat. The protection they'd extort might include smaller sums of money but would mainly include ISPs blocking customers from p2p routing -- only big .com and the like sites could be directly contacted. Then there'd be all the mandated filtering, sniffing, and spying on users, and evil DRM in everything, so-called "trusted" *retch* erm excuse me computing everywhere, and lots of similar policing of the net and of our own once-personal computers. And that of course would only be the beginning. Blocking open source software and creative commons content would be next, because anything of the sort directly competes with them on the level of ideology. Once they have the means to crush that competition they will. Making sure ordinary users have no power to reach large audiences is the eventual end there -- so this blog would die, and web forums and usenet; they want a monopoly on that. And once everyone gets the same exact ideologically-loaded pap from every source -- tv, print, internet, radio ... what's next looks an awful lot like 1984. Orwell's version that is, and not the real world's in which we gained Betamax. Which brings us back to where we started...
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