Grokster: Congress and the Courts

One of the interesting ways to approach Grokster is to imagine what would have happened had the Court come out the other way.  Had the Court ruled in Grokster’s favor, one imagines that the issue of controlling peer-to-peer file swapping immediately would have risen to the top of Congress’s agenda.  There is broad, bi-partisan support for the recording industry’s position on peer-to-peer in Congress, based largely on the fact that content creators are well-organized and well-financed whereas file-swappers are not.  The broadband industry (i.e., those interest groups that fought so hard in Brand X) do support relatively unhindered peer-to-peer file swapping, since file swapping has driven demand for broadband and convinced millions to abandon dial-up, but the issue does not appear to be their top legislative priority, and they seem to be less influential in Congress than the recording and motion picture industries in any event.

Bottom line: At the end of the day, it may be that the result of Grokster is a legal landscape more receptive to peer-to-peer than a world in which Grokster wins in the Court and then Congress steps into the fold with new legislation.  By losing the battle, file-swappers perhaps forestalled total defeat in the war.

Comments

[global_ads@advertising.com]

How about this version of the story:

Grokster and Morpheus are using the Congress and the Courts
for a 'better quality advertising campaign' !!
The same way Internet Explorer was globally advertised by
US_DOJ back in 1998!!!