Grokster loses, surprising only the willfully blind

Most people who follow case law saw this coming, although as Billboard PostPlay notes, the unanimous decision is a bit of a surprise.

So since this blog is about the business of music, how will the Grokster decision affect the industry?

Not much. This is pretty much a non-story, other than the fact that the Court a) heard the case and b) they sided with copyright holders instead of the company who designed a product specifically to cheat copyrights. On face value, who believed that the Court would side with Grokster?

Granted, some of the dialog in the Court Opinion hints at how the Court and the law will test the facilitation of copyright infringement, but even with that, case law will need to be developed before we can turn the FBI loose on all the bad guys. And of course, that sidesteps the obvious: when P2P sites spring up in China, all bets are pretty much off. The FBI can't do anything about, say, BitTorrent tracker sites and it's still pretty unlikely that a court is going to be able to issue a subpeona with any teeth. Who will they go after if they can't get the IP host?

Heh. That's the next big question, and likely, law enforcement woudl turn to ISPs. But that's proven very difficult before, and there's really no sense in believing that technology won't continue to sidestep efforts to curb P2P use.

And we all know that piracy is a much, much bigger hole in the dam than college kids ripping tunes in the U.S.

It's been noted before, but did anyone wonder why Microsoft wasn't in on Grokster or any of the other lawsuits against P2P? You'd think a company with that kind of resources would be a little angry at the P2P sharing of Office, XP, etc., a practice that has been going on since at least 1996 online and even further back when there were plenty of software makers who designed apps for duplicating software. The software companies are losing millions on P2P but they were mysteriously silent throughout this. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.

Copyright is a slippery snake and getting much, much more slippery. All attempts to control P2P have miserably failed. The Prohibition movement is failing. At what point do we decide that if copyright laws are basically uneforceable, do we start to consider alternatives to DRM? Or are content companies simply waiting for a DRM silver bullet to save themselves?