SCOTUS kills Grokster

BoingBoing has the most complete link rundown so far. My initial reaction was: "OK, now I know for certain that the Supreme Court is a bunch of hacks whose judgment gets warped by proximity to monied interests." However, the full picture, as Copyfight points out, may be more nuanced than that. I'll reserve judgment till I see how the legal community reacts.

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UPDATE(S) (28 June): More links...

• Ed Felten has some very believable predictions for the future, and notes on the Supreme Court's odd ideas about acceptable business models for software companies.
• Nathan Newman sees a parallel between this case and the Ten Commandments case.
• USACM (the policy arm of the nation's premier computer science professional organization) has a press release on its blog. They seem relatively pleased, since the ruling appears to leave technologists per se in the clear.
• Eric Goldman's big link roundup
• Copyfight has many, many posts, all interesting:
  • "Thou Shalt Not 'Ster"
  • Wall Street's reaction to Grokster
  • Whither Movies?
  • What's Inducement?
  • Grokster Q&A with Gigi Sohn
  • more, more...
• Fred von Lohmann: "Supreme Court Sows Uncertainty"
• Ernest Miller on: RIAA/MPAA press conference, plus yet another link roundup, plus notes on the possible future of open source and Sony.
• BoingBoing: Grokster press conference audio
• William Patry claims: "The Court Punts"
• Cory Doctorow's severely disappointed.

NYT and WaPo drop ball on Grokster

The Grokster case makes for infuriating/exciting times in the land of intellectual property. Both NYTimes and WaPo have come down on the wrong side of the case, and in both cases the editorial was so poorly reasoned that I have difficulty understanding what's going on.

The NYTimes and WaPo editorials both amount to the same argument: that Grokster is different from previous "infringement-enabling" technologies like the printing press, the photocopier, and the VCR because Grokster is designed to facilitate "theft". This statement is plainly false: Grokster is a content-neutral technology, just like the Web, just like the VCR, just like the photocopier and the printing press. Grokster carries whatever bits its users put on the network. The only evidence that Grokster was designed to facilitate "theft" is that some substantial fraction of existing traffic does, in fact, consist of copyright infringement. But look at the history of the VCR, the photocopier, and the printing press, and you can see that infringement was always a major (if not predominant) use early in the technology's history. But gradually, some combination of laws and social norms brought the usage back into balance again. The Grokster case is about preemptively banning certain technologies before they are even brought into market, before that balance can be found.

I literally cannot understand --- I cannot understand, it does not compute --- how any disinterested and thoughtful person could honestly make the arguments that NYTimes and WaPo are making.

So, if reason's not the driving force here, I can only conclude that social-network-based groupthink plays a role. The editors of the NYTimes and WaPo move in social circles where they work with, play golf with, have dinner with, etc., people in influential positions in the big media conglomerates. Bill Keller, and other top editors at major newspapers, do not socialize with Richard Stallman or Lawrence Lessig; they socialize with people who write, promote, or distribute books, magazines, movies, television shows, and music. And so by social osmosis, they absorb the mindset and values of these people, and not the mindset of people who actually, you know, understand the technology and the law.

It's a sad and cynical conclusion to draw, and I would love to be proven wrong, but it's the only one I can draw when these editorials contain such ridiculous tripe.