MGM v. Grokster

[winters500]

The Supreme Court has finally and unanimously spoken, though they didn't say a whole lot. If I understand the proceedings correctly, this means merely that the trial now continues. Usman (or anyone else), have you read about this yet? I agreed w/ Justice Breyer's comments the most, probably

Comments

Creativity vs. Technology

[winters500]

Yeah, that's pretty much how the Supreme Court sees it. Let me clarify a little bit, though: they see copyrights, including digital copyrights, as the means whereby artists are protected, economically speaking. If intellectual property were not protected from new technologies, so the story goes, all art could be freely copied and distributed, as soon as we gain the technological capability. Because the artist would no longer be compensated, creating art would become economically prohibitive. In other words, if artists couldn't make money selling their art, no one would want to be an artist, which would then, in turn, be a detriment to society, since society needs art.

In other words, at the most fundamental level, our laws are set up to maintain a societal status quo through protection of property rights (it's all right there in Locke's Second Treatise). The argument is that without this protection of private property, things like art would be impossible (Hobbes had something to say about that too, I think). Art, of course, has existed for much longer than the English common law system, and will exist long after MGM and the RIAA bite the dust.

Incidentally, I do believe in protecting the rights of starving artists. But protecting the rights of corporations, just because they have the power to invest in those rights by trading empty promises to starving artists for them before they've realized any value and then selling the public a severly restricted access to them after creating an economic demand through marketing... this I'm not so keen about. Often, it's the artists who lose out. And the art itself. And society.