A bunch of my EFF co-workers are in Hollywood tomorrow, fighting for your rights and mine. Today is the day that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals hears the Morpheus appeal, fighting the studios who say that the toolmakers who build P2P networks should be on the hook for what their users do with those networks (like saying that Bank of America should be able to sue Ford if they get stuck up by someone driving a Mustang getaway car).
Good luck to them. We've won this fight in the lower court, and we'd all better hope we win it again on appeal, too: otherwise, you can kiss the idea of general-purpose networks goodbye: network operators will have to build their systems to police their users' activities, using fallible human judgement or even more fallible algorithms to grant or forbid access to the network depending on the file you're trying to share.
"This is not just a case about peer-to-peer," countered Fred von Lohmann, who represents Streamcast and is senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It is a case that will determine whether technology companies are allowed to innovate or whether they have to ask permission from copyright owners before they build new products."
The legal doctrine tested in this case is the same one that protects companies like Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft from being held liable when someone uses HP CD burners or Internet Explorer to commit copyright infringement, von Lohmann said.
"It's important to protect the Betamax doctrine, so the price of innovation doesn't become a huge lawsuit from the entertainment industry," he said.
In the landmark Sony Betamax case in 1984, the Supreme Court ruled that Sony was not liable for contributory copyright infringement for selling VCRs that allowed consumers to tape content from their televisions.
This will be an important day in the history of the future. Hold your breath and hope. And give to EFF — someone's got to fight this fight.
