Jim Griffin, founder of the Pho music/tech mailing list, weighs in with an impressive and passionate email about the P2P-legalizing Grokster decision and what it means for music labels.
Here's why you should applaud today's decision: It brings us closer to monetizing peered sharing and putting real money in the pockets of artists, labels, publishers, and other rights holders. How? Because it moves them one step closer to the correct judgment, which is that it is now impractical and inefficient to control the quantity and destiny of digits — especially so those that carry mass media like music — in the increasingly friction-free world of digitization. When that judgment is drawn, service licensing begins. Until that judgment is drawn, product-based control continues in vain. Publishers long ago accepted technology and license it today — they licensed Napster — and their revenues are climbing; sound recording companies continue to resist every new technology and refuse to license, and their revenues are falling. This decision will benefit the music business the same way getting arrested for drunk driving benefits an alcoholic, summoning forth the day of reckoning and hastening rehabilitation.
This judgment doesn't destroy distribution — it enables licensing. How? It reminds one of the parties in the licensing battle that one of the vines it was relying upon to to cling to the past will no longer be viable. Hyper-efficient delivery destroys distribution, meaning that the just-in-time delivery of digits will eventually destroy their distribution entirely. That is a ways off, but from what I'm hearing back-channel it is not too far off, as Apple prepares its tiny wireless iPod with no hard-drive but enhanced Wi-Max (metropolitan-wide high-bandwidth wireless) connectivity; it won't destroy downloading over night, but it will take a whack at its market share, and slowly but surely shift the market away from distribution/downloading and towards delivery/streaming.
Update: John Parres notes "Actually *I* am the founder of the pho list and Jim is the founder of the pho brunches so we round it off and call ourselves the co-founders of pho."
