I wrote this editorial for the Edinburgh law school's website on how the copyright wars are being waged today because big technology companies have lost their nerve. It has extra meaning this week, when Grokster is being played out at the Supreme Court, where a tech company has exhibited the intestinal fortitude to stand up to the entertainment industry bullies.
Time was, companies like Sony could be relied upon to spend hundreds of millions of dollars defending its right to market good technology to its customers — the company spent eight years in court sticking up for the VCR at a time when the consensus among legal scholars was that giving the public the ability to copy movies in their sitting rooms was flat-out illegal.
Time was companies shipped products that sat at the intersection of the limits of engineering and what the public could be convinced to buy: jukeboxes, cable TV, radio, VCRs, MP3 players, you name it, if it was dodgy, cool and likely to freak out an entertainment exec, someone out there would offer it for sale.
Time was that copyright changed whenever some entrepreneur invented something cool and infringing and compelling and the courts or lawmakers legalized it with reforms to copyright.
Times have changed. Today, businesses shrink away from offering general-purpose technology whose suite of uses includes ones that fall outside the confines of today's copyright — like automatic commercial-skipping in PVRs. They run screaming from businesses that are clearly infringing by today's standards — like DVD-ripping movie jukeboxes.
