Grokster?

Even the VCR was used originally for infringement. Take home-video rental for example … Jack Valenti of all people went to Congress to say this is bad, we’re not going to be able to sell any movie tickets.

Michael Weiss, 6/27/05 on Open Source

You were getting used to paying for your music anyway, at 99 cents a pop for your iPod. Then today, the Supreme Court said unanimously: just forget about the romance, the furtive pleasure, of free music, or file-sharing as it’s called, meaning: the twilight trade in music (and movies for that matter) that have been downloaded from the Internet and then scattered to the four winds, no matter that the writers of the songs, and the movies, weren’t being paid for their work. The copyright hawks won the Supreme Court votes today. Grokster lost, because as the enabler of file-sharing it was pretty openly in the piracy business. The question’s what else has been lost in the fencing in of the Internet’s wide open spaces. And is it up to the “entertaiment industry,??? the movie and record companies, to write the rules and the pricetags for every dip you take into the wonderworld of the Web. On Open Source: The progress of law-and-order in the Wild West of the Internet.

Joshua Wattles

a law professor and copyright lawyer, served as council for both Paramount Pictures and Gnutella, a file sharing company, not unlike Grokster or Limewire

[via studio in LA]

Michael Weiss

CEO of StreamCast Networks, defendant in MGM v. Grokster & StreamCast Networks

[via phone from Los Angeles]

Jack Valenti

retired Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Motion Picture Association of America

[by the phone from DC]

JD Lasica

author of Darknet, blogger for New Media Musings,

and founder and executive director of ourmedia

[by phone from San Francisco’s East Bay]