The media coverage of the Grokster decision is so slanted towards the current big music industry that one wonders if the RIAA has spent more money lobbying the press than they have Congress. Nearly every article I have read can be summarized as "this is good for consumers because now they will be able to buy more music". Which is, of course, hogwash. I don't remember hearing many people clamoring for more ways to spend money on music. The music industry doesn't want creativity in pricing or delivery; now that they have iTunes, all other services are going to have to look a lot like it, or die.
More humorously, none of the coverage I saw discussed BitTorrent. The news services don't understand it (although its users do). It's not really a money-making service: it's a protocol. Bram Cohen, the originator of the protocol and the first software to embody that protocol, has never encouraged its use for sharing pirated music and video, although it is amazingly popular for doing that. It is also the tool of choice for the music that the RIAA wishes didn't exist: the stuff that the artists are perfectly happy to have available for free, such as that at etree.
BitTorrent also has very obvious uses for legit distribution of large files such as Linux and BSD distributions. These days, I always use BitTorrent instead of FTP for new releases, and I always leave my sharing window open until I have given at least as much as I have received (and usually try to go to 2x if there folks still downloading).
Of course, much of BitTorrent use is clearly illegal. Bram has made that clear by making the BitTorrent page a search engine for torrents, supported by AskJeeves-sourced advertising. Searching even for artists that support free downloading of their concert material brings up pirated versions of their commercial material.
This doesn't mean that BitTorrent is encouraging piracy: it means that the press completely missed the mark when it said that the Grokster decision is going to help consumers get what they want. BitTorrent will become the protocol of choice for trading pirated music exactly because it has never been trumpeted as being good for pirating, because it is already well-established for trading ok-to-be-free music, and because it is really good for distributing large OS installations and applications.
Ed Felten raises similar points, as well as scarier ones.
Posted by lookit at June 28, 2005 07:15 AM