Supreme Court Takes Hard Look at P2P 489
Patrick Mannion writes "Supreme Court justices quizzed attorneys for file-swapping software companies and Hollywood studios Tuesday, in a case that will help determine the future of both the technology and entertainment industries. In their questions, the justices were critical of the entertainment industry's proposal, which would hold companies "predominantly" supported by piracy liable for copyright infringement. However, they showed little sympathy for the file-swapping companies' business model."
Business Model? (Score:5, Insightful)
What about open source p2p (Score:2, Insightful)
who have no buisness model at all ! not that a bad ruling would make a difference , the internet is global , the cat IS out of the bag and congress and their bribers might be suprised that their legal decisions will not affect the other 5 billion people living in countries where their wants and laws have exactly 0 influence
of course the p2p creators will just move to less opressive countries, it works for gambling and porn sites
the "free world" has moved on, unfortunatly corporate America hasn't
Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
This will enable them to make a stronger case in their basic "p2p is bad" argument, when it's not the way it should be. Hopefully they will view the two things differently
sould creators have some rights too.. (Score:4, Insightful)
P2P is basically publishing. Why should you be allowed to publish my stuff, if I hold the copyright?
These rights go away with time when the copyright expires. (A really stupid long time, thanks congress)
If a creator wants to make something public domain then they can do that. If they want to paid for something they create, they should be able to do that too. (my photos are routinely hot linked as bloggers backgrounds and I don't care, so I don't sue)
Whats with the right to do what you want with whatever you want all of a sudden?
Re:Business Model? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hard Cases = Bad Law (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, the only tool really before the Court is an overturning of the Betamax doctrine, which was decided with a much more sympathetic defendent.
This is one of the few cases I can think of where the appropriate charge should have been conspiracy. It's a crappy bit of law, but it would actually fit. As it is, I'm afraid that the Defendents may have screwed us all.
Please don't guilt trip me, it won't help you... (Score:2, Insightful)
Hey, I am all for supporting artists that support the free distribution of their music. You want to make money from me? Allow your fans to put your live shows up on the various torrent sites (etree, easytree, etc) and I'll take a listen and possibly buy your stuff. If you expect me to take the $10 risk and buy your stuff before getting a good chance of hearing a variety of your music on many different days I can't say I will support you.
I really can't stand the "if we don't get paid we can't pay rent thing." It always seems to me that you're trying to play the MPAA guilt trip thing. I just can't believe that you would do nothing but play music in an attempt to support yourself if you weren't 110% sure you could.
No matter what, if you use that tired rhetoric, I won't buy or listen to your stuff regardless of how it's distributed. Just keep that in mind.
Predominantly Pirate (Score:3, Insightful)
Prediction: Court rules in favor of P2P. Heres why (Score:5, Insightful)
Likewise, you can't restrict people's ussage of P2P just because P2P it is also used for piracy, after all P2P is probably one of the most useful networking patterns in existence for all kinds of things.
If I were the enterntainment industry, I'd embrace P2P as it solves one of the biggest problems they face today: Bandwith to millions of people. This just goes on to show that the people running the enterntainment industry are dinosaurs falling behind the times.
Re:More proof the Supremes work for Business (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean, come on. The court was being critical on both sides. Hence the part of the justices were critical of the entertainment industry's proposal, which would hold companies "predominantly" supported by piracy liable for copyright infringement.
So to you, when they say they're critical of the entertainment industry's proposals, that means they really not? Er...what you talking bout Willis?
Transcript (cont'd): (Score:2, Insightful)
The scary part about it is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Then it becomes entirely about who is lining whose pockets. The RIAA, with the help of some of its friends, has a decent shot at buying what it wants.
Granted there are opponents w/ money, but the RIAA has proven to be very motivated.
what's the best way to support musicians? (Score:5, Insightful)
But the question of compensating artists has not been addressed. We need to create an environment where downloaders want to support musicians they love rather than simply downloading their stuff for free.
Musicians need to start setting up tipjars [imaginaryplanet.net] and consumers need to ask rigorous question about how much of anything they purchase goes to an intermediary.
I recently went to a concert of Kristin Hersh where she sold no CD's but encouraged people to support her by buying mp3's of demos off her website [throwingmusic.com]. I bought $20 of mp3's off her website, of which Hersh received a significant percentage. Is that the future?
Here are some other thoughts about how to reward musicians [idiotprogrammer.com]
Re:Activist Court (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly! Keep the decisions in Congress, where they are more easily bought and paid for!
From the sound of it, the court is taking a reasonable approach. Have some faith in the institution, they have a hell of a track record.
Re:Activist Court (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Business Model? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:sould creators have some rights too.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Why should "intellectual property owners" have special privileges with regard to their products which allow them to override normal private property rights?
Does a cabinet maker get to control how people use the cabinets that the cabinetmaker has sold them? (I suppose he could always make them sign a contract, but I suspect he'd lose a lot of customers that way.)
predominant (Score:5, Insightful)
You can shoot the messenger, but another will rise in its place.
Note to the RIAA/MPAA: profit from P2P, instead of trying to fight it. You've just had the most powerful and potentially convenient distribution method in the world dropped in your laps, and it costs you nothing to distribute content now. If you can't find a way to increase your profits in light of that, then you deserve extinction. Someone will rise to replace you, too.
Re:Business Model? (Score:2, Insightful)
Tobacco CEO "Hey, were lying to & killing our customers for money, but so what, it makes us cash to pay the suckers in congress to keep them off our backs!"
McDonald's CEO: "Let's hire a bunch of low paid workers and get rich off of them. Slaves even made more money than what were paying them!"
Looks good (Score:5, Insightful)
--
Want a free iPod? [freeipods.com]
Or try a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox. [freegamingsystems.com] (you only need 4 referrals)
Wired article as proof [wired.com]
Re:sould creators have some rights too.. (Score:0, Insightful)
If they win this, then next they'll be looking at CD burners or whatever else that threatens the industries chokehold on content.
This case comes down to a simple fact: Just because something has possible illegal uses (which are already covered by other laws!), should anyone be able to get that product banned? Or effectively banned, since that's what the ability to be sued by every large company that competes with any given software would mean.
Re:sould creators have some rights too.. (Score:3, Insightful)
The truth is very simple in this situation.
1.) P2P file-sharing is just a technology, neither good nor bad.
2.) Copyright infringement of other people's stuff, no matter how many people try to justify it, is ethically wrong.
The big struggle with this is coming from frightened content owners who realize that people are lazy and don't care and will pirate anything they can get their hands on, simply because human nature is such that if you can get something without paying for it, you will. Frankly, piracy is wrong and always will be wrong, and legal downloading like iTunes is already taking off, which means most pirates are so cheap that they're not willing to spend 99 cents on a song. However, there is nothing wrong with the technology itself, like with VCRs.
Re:Prediction: Court rules in favor of P2P. Heres (Score:5, Insightful)
I like the analogy, but I'd say that modern P2P is more like the broadsword--you can use it to cook or you can use it to kill people, but you can be damn sure that it was designed with a specific purpose in mind...
Yes, P2P is used for plenty of legal activity. A P2P application, in and of itself, does not violate the law. You're lying to yourself, though, if you suggest that the driving force behind P2P is anything other than illegal file sharing.
I, too, think that the court will find in favor of P2P, but honestly, there are no good guys in court today. One side is a pack of morally bankrupt, lying weasels who claim to be looking out for the little guy but are really in it for the money--but I don't care too much for the other side, either.
Re:More proof the Supremes work for Business (Score:2, Insightful)
Heck, I still have copyrighted software and magazines that will have my copyright 70 years after I die - and in my family we live about 100 years on average, so I'm expecting my copyrights will expire in 2130 or so. This is just plain wrong.
Re:sould creators have some rights too.. (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't like the draconian legal wrangling to restrict software that has legitimate uses.
I don't like the copy-protection schemes and corporate masters who pollute music stores with the computer-enhanced carbon-copy drek that issues forth from the mouths of such talent as N Sync and Jessica Simpson.
I don't like any of this crap better than anybody else does. But there's a reality to face. The overwhelming majority of p2p network use is unquestionably illegal in the USA, and the overwhelming majority of p2p users are unquestioningly violating the law. You and I know that the content cartels won't win this fight through legal means, and you and I know that they're missing the boat on this completely. You and I know that they should be leveraging this technology to their profit rather than bullying 16 year olds with legal action.
But you guys need to, at some point, realize that these companies are protecting property that legally belongs to them (whether or not it should is another issue) and they have every right to do so.
I'll spare you the traditional flawed analogy.
NPR puff piece on the subject (Score:5, Insightful)
Usually, NPR excels in their reporting. But on this subject (as well as the subject of low-power FM broadcasting, another place where public radio puts its own interests above those of the public) they fall way short.
Re:Business Model? (Score:5, Insightful)
I do wonder if the gun makers found liable in that case appealed the matter. News stories about lawsuits always piss me off because they only announce two things: filed lawsuits and dollars given. If a case is dismissed as frivolous by a judge, that never gets reported; and if a case is appealed, that never gets reported. For instance, the McDonald's coffee case was ill-reported as it was, but the media didn't tell you that the woman's award was significantly reduced after the jury verdict was announced. Simply put, the vast majority of what happens in court isn't news-worthy. (Although if it happens in criminal court and there is a celebrity defendant, somehow everything that happens becomes monumental and deserving of widespread media coverage. What color underwear was Jacko wearing in court today, anyhow?)
Re:Activist Court (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Prediction: Court rules in favor of P2P. Heres (Score:3, Insightful)
That analogy only goes so far. Dynamite, for example, can be used in construction or mining, but can also be used to blow people up. In most or all countries, explosives are legal but highly regulated.
I'm not saying that your kitchen knife analogy is invalid, just that the principle you extrapolate from it is overly broad. There are many things that governments regulate tightly, or even ban entirely (uranium, for example) from private hands, not just because they can be used to kill people, but because common people don't have a plausible need for them. The density of uranium probably makes it an excellent paperweight, but that's unlikely to convince a court to make the government sell you some.
In other words, the debate should be about the potential for harm (let's not pretend that P2P isn't used for copyright infringement) and the potential good. You can consider technology to be "pure" and agenda-free if you want an intellectual discussion, but if you want to win a court case you'll probably need to come up with significant non-infringing uses for it.
Re:What /. pirates don't want you to know (Score:3, Insightful)
Nice; flame the Slashdot readers by calling them all pirates. A work of genius.
To be sure, piracy is just people trying to get stuff for free by illegal means. However, peer-to-peer file sharing has no more to do with pirating multimedia content than using a web browser on the internet has to do with violating copyrights.
Do you consider your use of a web browser on the internet to be nothing more than a means that allows you to violate the copyrights of others?
Re:What /. pirates don't want you to know (Score:3, Insightful)
True enough. But filesharing is not just people wanting to get stuff for free, which is the point of this court case.
What am I getting for free by spending a big chunk of my web server's bandwidth allocation seeding a torrent [alaska.edu] of the Project Gutenberg [gutenberg.org] DVD, for example? (If you're downloading that and one of your peers is sending you a couple megabits/sec of data, that's probably me. You're welcome!) If Grokster and company lose this suit, it will quite possibly become illegal for me to give out that collection of free, unquestionably legal, public-domain works. What a victory for the public good that would be!
Re:Business Model? (Score:1, Insightful)
if a gun company willingly ignores the fact their guns are falling into criminals hands.
not just that it happens which they cant really control... but that they do nothing to stop or even question why xyz gun store is ordering model z in bulk (higher than anyone else) something is fishy. or atleast needs to be looked at.
it falls under the lines of recklessness.
same thing with the excessively easy convertablenss to full automatic weapons that serve no purpose besides human hunting
Government interests (Score:4, Insightful)
Because in general the courts have decided that the government has an interest in preventing crimes, not just punishing them.
That means that sometimes they'll make activities illegal even when they don't harm anybody. Owning an unregistered gun is usually illegal, even if you don't shoot anybody. Driving while intoxicated is illegal even if you don't hit anybody. Owning cocaine has legitimate medical purposes, but try telling the court that you have a gram to fix nosebleeds. Lockpicks and other tools often used in the commission of crimes are illegal in some places.
If they find that a bit of technology is used primarily for illegal purposes, they'll make the technology itself illegal. It's not a very libertarian attitude, and in the cases I cited there are plenty of people who would say that the court is wrong. And it certainly conflicts with your rights in a strict-constructionist sense. But the courts have often found that "insure domestic Tranquility" can include preventative measures.
So feel free to disagree with it, but their reasoning shouldn't be totally opaque.
Re:Business Model? (Score:3, Insightful)
Choice is key.
Re:sould creators have some rights too.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Bzzt! Wrong! "Copyright infringement of other people's stuff" is legally wrong. It is not necessarily ethically wrong.
If the term of copyright is too long (and there are many who feel that way), is it unethical to copy something that has passed the "reasonable" copyright term but is still covered by an "unreasonable but legally defined as X" term? (e.g., performing "Happy Birthday" in a public place - not Fair Use - and not paying royalties)?
If you feel copyright is unethical as a point of first principle, since "information wants to be free," is it unethical to violate copyright (i.e., is it unethical to ignore an unethical law)?
Furthermore, as long as we're on the subject of ethics, is it not ALSO unethical to "change the terms of the copyright deal" after the fact (when Steamboat Willie was created, it was understood that copyright was X years; Disney later lobbied to have copyright extended to X+Y years with no additional public benefit)? Disney is robbing the public of that which ought to have been rightfully theirs - Disney agreed to X years, but then decided they wanted to change the terms when X years was almost up. Is not unilaterally altering the terms of a contract after the contract is entered into unethical?
The public did not "break the social contract of copyright" by mass infringement first. Copyright holders broke the social contract of copyright first by unilaterally changing the terms from "reasonable" to "completely unreasonable" after the contract was entered into. Once a contract has been broken by one party, there is no ethical reason for the other to continue to uphold their end the contract (e.g., if I agree to pay you in advance for services rendered, and I never pay you, there is no ethical requirement for you render those services). Since copyright holders broke their end of the contract by seeking ever-longer terms and ever-more restrictive laws on material that had already had the terms and restrictions defined at the moment of creation (i.e., retroactively changing the law), there is no ethical reason for the general populace to uphold their end of the contract by not infringing.
The objection above, of course, applies only to material that retroactively had its copyright extended, but it is also not unethical to break the terms of an unreasonable contract that has been unilaterally imposed (with is, in effect, what copyright has become); if copyright terms are unreasonable, there is no ethical problem with ignoring them because the contract itself is unreasonable to begin with.
Please don't confuse "legal" with "ethical." Many things that are ethical are not encoded into law. Many things that are encoded into law are not ethical.
--AC
Re:Business Model? (Score:1, Insightful)
You'll have to forgive my ignorance.
So if Sharman had simply written some code, excluded any adware/spyware, and released it without promotion, suddenly the software has more 'substantial non-infringing use'? Either this software is legal to write and distribute or it isn't- and in your mind that depends upon whether someone's making money?
The way that this all depends on someone making money is that the RIAA wouldn't bother to sue someone they couldn't get some cash from. That's indeed the only part of the BitTorrent "business model" that matters: they have no money.
Re:sould creators have some rights too.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Copyright infringement of other people's stuff, no matter how many people try to justify it, is ethically wrong.
If the only method that can successfully enforce copyright is to turn our nation, and the internet itself into some little fascist paradise, well then, it can't ethically be wrong. If the only method, is to force-feed propaganda to schoolchildren at taxpayer expense, well then, again, the law is more of a crime than the crime itself.
I'd much rather never be able to sell my own intellectual property than to have to live in a world turned into a shithole.
Re:Prediction: Court rules in favor of P2P. Heres (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that "P2P" is not monolithic, and each variation requires a different analogy. Things like Grokster were certainly intended to aid (illicit) media swapping, and their associated business entities don't help to dissuade this notion. OTOH we have stuff like BitTorrent, which has literally enourmous [google.com] non-infringing uses (result #3 and similar notwithstanding).
Hmm...I'm having trouble here, what kind of blade is BitTorrent? Maybe a chainsaw powered by a beowulf cluster of tandem exercise bikes?
I am getting content that I've PAID for (Score:1, Insightful)
Nuff Said.
These guys are representing P2P? (Score:3, Insightful)
Far Reaching Industry Effects (Score:5, Insightful)
If a company ( or person ) can be held legally accountable for the improper use of his product then many industries are screwed and this could wreak havoc on the countries economy due to the litigious nature of the present day.
Everyone from car manufacturers, to gun makers could now be argued, with this precedent, that they are liable. Even a brick manufacturer could conceivably sued under this pretense.
The fall out of this case may just effect the long term viability of this country.
Why don't we question the legality of copyrights? (Score:3, Insightful)
i'm not going to even touch the particular argument about whether P2P software or activities are inherently illegal or not because i'll make my vote on my own.
what bothers me is the inherent idea of copyrighting materials. i believe as most people presumably do that it is fair to expect to make a living off the work you produce. but i don't see how it is an automatic right that anything you make muscially should sustain you for years, particularly if you never do anything again.
as an activist for freedom of speech, i will certainly allow that a song of revolution is equally valuable as a novel that shook the world. but as a consumer, i'll tell you that i think the average Britney Spears schmaltz isn't worth even listening to the ads on the radio, let alone paying money for it. and the fact that twenty years from now, they'll be selling minivans to her current fans using that song just saddens me. the fact that any person can cruise talentlessly through the music industry and then get huffy about protecting their right to live off that "work" just makes me laugh
but what makes me cry is something different. take the example of Happy Birthday. one of those universal songs, you might end up singing it every month for the rest of your life (certainly around my office you do). it is one of the cornerstones of Western culture, a part of our collective social imaginary. we as a people sing this song in celebration time and again.
unless of course you're in the movies or a commercial or television. because yes, somebody wrote it and they expect to get paid. who cares if they're ninety year old ladies at this point. or for that matter, who cares if it's the children of those 90 year old ladies. or for that matter if it's Vivendi Universal or BMG or Sony who bought the rights to the copyright off the children of those now-dead 90 year-old ladies but still stand up demanding their 18 cents everytime it's played in a commercial setting.
yes it makes sense that you should get a living out of the works you produce, but frankly with patents and copyrights being given extensions time and again, these works are money-earning products so long past any human lifespan that the idea of the creator making a living from it has been lost. give them five years. give them twenty years. i think it's fair that a generation should pass before something enters the public domain (though it still seems too long).
the fact is that copyright has become an inalienable right to be greedy about some cute catchy riff that has all the weight or importance of that pothole i ran over yesterday. it protects the rights of singularly untalented people and defies the truth that some songs have been embraced and loved by humanity.
i still don't understand (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Prediction: Court rules in favor of P2P. Heres (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Activist Court (Score:2, Insightful)
When this does get to Congress, and it probably will, you can count on your "beloved" Microsoft to put up the $ on our side. If you look closely at this issue, the MPAA and RIAA not only want to make Grokster et al liable, but also other software and hardware makers. You can guarantee Microsoft, Intel and the gang will not stand being liable for piracy.
Photocopier (Score:5, Insightful)
Would text scanners exist at all?
These both have infringing uses but they are not the subject of lobbying groups attempting to deny their very existance.
It is all about powerful lobby groups attempting to maintain their stranglehold on media creation and deny the people their voice. (Ok that is a little strong). It is about $$$$.
Re:Business Model? (Score:1, Insightful)
You consider that rational? To me, that's insane.
Feed a Musician? (Score:2, Insightful)
When the heck has an executive said to a musician, "Sorry pal, due to illegal downloads, we don't have enough money to pay you."
Sorry, but the musicians-are-getting-screwed defense is a crock.
Re:What about open source p2p (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed, just like they did with DMCA. Republicrats and Democans can all be purchased for the proper amount of bribes. Of course it is not called a bribe, but campaign contributions. The entertainment companies have a lot of money, but then do the technology companies. The outcome may be determined by which is able or willing to buy more legislators. What the public wants or needs will not be considered, just as it was not when the DMCA was enacted.
Re:Hard Cases = Bad Law (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, you have another problem here. Business model may be a legitimate target but it doesn;'t get you off the hook here.... IIRC, Grokster is largely a Gnutella-based system and interoperates with other such programs. Just because you make Grokster liable doesn't make the problem go away. I.e. all Grokster does is add some services (chat, etc) to an otherwise decentralized file-sharing network. I.e. Grokster makes money by providing non-infringing services to a group of copyright infringers. Just because you force Grokster out of business does not necessarily impact the infringing activity at all. *In fact, the file sharing networks that they have built will survive them.*
Now, you can make a stronger argument for shutting down the internet if what you want to do is stop infringement. Shutting down Grokster will have *no impact* but shutting down AOL, MSN, Earthlink, and every other ISP in the US will. However, here you run into everything that one has said about Betamax....
Furthermore you have another problem targetting the business model here. What do you do about open source gnutella clients? There is no business model based on profiting from infringement there. So get rid of Grokster, the company, and replace it with Gnutella. Who is responsible.
In the end, I think that it is reasonable to say that someone who is *directly profiting* from infringement might be liable (ala Napster), but ultimate responsiblity for actual infringement is with the person sharing the music. No court judgements against Grokster, Streamcast, etc. will impact this.
In the end, the way to *kill* the current predatory music industry is not to redistribute the stupid music that they distribute today, but rather to build a new infrastructure for promoting music outside the major recording studios. Gnu-Radio might be one aspect. There are others as well. THere are many companies trying to get this sort of thing started now--- Open Music is where Linux was in 1995, so give it another 5 years....
Re:Why don't we question the legality of copyright (Score:3, Insightful)
Ye gads, I have to punt the mod points on this one. Where did you get this shit? Certainly not the constitution. Read it. Here's what it says in section 8:
"The Congress shall have Power (...) To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
Ergo, the purpose of copyright is, as written, To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts. Not, as you say, for the author to earn a fast buck. That's only the means to the end. Congress could decide tomorrow (shyeah, right) that the "limited Times" be shortened to a single day and there'd be nothing the authors could do about it (aside from that pesky Berne convention). The authors' estates certainly weren't a consideration in the first copyright laws, which granted copyright for a whopping 14 years.
Hell, you even said that copyright doesn't do a good job at promoting the arts -- so by your own statement and the constitutional wording, copyright, at least in its current form, doesn't work! It's not serving its constitutional purpose! Now that I'm sure many /.'ers would get behind! :)
Re:sould creators have some rights too.. (Score:4, Insightful)
How can you justify this statement, given that "copyright infringement" has no consistent definition ?
"Copyright infringement" in, say, Australia (where we can't even legally record most things off TV) is a very different things to "copyright infringment" in, say, the US.
The big struggle with this is coming from frightened content owners who realize that people are lazy and don't care and will pirate anything they can get their hands on, simply because human nature is such that if you can get something without paying for it, you will.
This is not true at all. Exhibit A: bottled water.
All "content owners" have to do is make things cheap, attractive and easy enough and the vast bulk of customers will pay for their goods. The problem is "content owners" aren't prepared to price their stuff low enough.
Frankly, piracy is wrong and always will be wrong, [...]
That is rather dependant on your view of copyright and "intellectual property" in general.
[...] and legal downloading like iTunes is already taking off, which means most pirates are so cheap that they're not willing to spend 99 cents on a song.
I'm not prepared to spend that much on a song - more accurately, I'm not prepared to spend that much on a bunch of songs. US$0.99/song still works out to roughly the same price as buying an entire album's worth of songs - the only major different being buying per-song allows you to make sure you get only the songs you want. That's not even taking into account the lower sound quality and additional restrictions typically inherent to on-line music stores.
Re:Hard Cases = Bad Law (Score:3, Insightful)
I understand you want to argue this is different than Betamax, but you you did not actually do so.
In this case it can be argued that the existing P2P programs are used primarily for copyright infringement.
In other words you are suggesting overturning Betamax.
What Betamax says is: "it need merely be capable of substantial noninfringing uses".
You are trying to make an argument that providing a perfectly legitimate product to a perfectly legitimate market of law abiding people to use for perfectly legitimate purposes *becomes* illegal if there also happen to be other people who will also seek out your product and who plan to use it for illegitimate purposes if that other group winds up being a majority.
According to Betamax that is *exactly* what you cannot do. You cannot penalize a legitimate producer of a legitimate product, and just as importanly you cannot deny the legitimate customers access to that product simply because they became a minority.
According to Betamax you cannot try to argue about percentages unless you want to argue that there is *NO* substantial noninfringing use at all. And you certainly cannot argue over oujia-board predictions about percentages might be in the future. When Grokster first created their product they did not have to read tea-leaves or consult with the spirits to guess at what the future usage percentages would be. When they first released their product they simply needed to know that they had a legitimate product with substantial legitimate use. It was a legal product when they released it. The product does not flip-flop between legal and illegal if the public usage percentages happen to drift back and forth between 51% and 49%.
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