BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Wednesday, December 22, 2004
TARGETING TECHNOLOGY. The
entertainment industry is running wild again, shutting
down servers that were
being used to download movies illegally. Moral and legal arguments
about file-sharing aside, what's significant about this is that the
Motion
Picture Association of America
(MPAA) is going after websites that use BitTorrent,
a newish piece of software that greatly speeds up the transfer of
large files.
Jess
Kilby wrote about
BitTorrent for the Portland Phoenix back in March. Without
getting too technical, the way it works is that you download a file -
say, a movie - in pieces from many users, rather than as one big
file. At the same time, you're automatically uploading even as you're
downloading. Users say that the more people who are doing it, the
faster the file transfer goes.
Because the MPAA is going after
sites that apparently facilitated file-sharing rather than targeting
BitTorrent itself, it would be unfair to say that the industry is
trying to shut down a particular technology. Still, there are some
free-speech principles here that shouldn't be overlooked.
In the 1980s, the entertainment
industry actually tried to stop the sale of VCRs, then a nascent
technology, arguing that their only possible use was to steal
copyrighted material. But in Sony
Corporation of America v. Universal Studios,
Inc. (1984), the
Supreme Court refused to ban VCRs, ruling that they could also be
used for perfectly legal purposes, such as time-shifting. Thus was
the movie biz saved from its own narrow-sightedness: videos
ultimately emerged as an important new source of revenue.
On the other hand, Napster
eventually lost
its legal battle, with the
federal courts ruling that its music-sharing service could be used
for almost nothing but copyright violation. (Today's
Napster has nothing to do
with the original service; an existing service merely acquired the
name.)
What may be significant here is
that the original Napster was not just a service that facilitated the
trading of music files, copyrighted and not. It was also a software
concept that has been abandoned, lest others run afoul of the law.
Newer services, such as KaZaA and LimeWire, are better protected
legally because they do not compile a centralized file of what's
available - but they're also harder to use.
I'm rambling this morning. Sorry
about that. What is the significance of all this with regard to
BitTorrent? Simply this: like the original Napster, it can be used
for illegal file-sharing. But like the VCR, it also has many
legal uses. In the nascent world of podcasting,
for instance, BitTorrent can be used to speed the transfer of large
audio files produced by DIY radio programmers.
It's one thing for the MPAA to go
after those who would steal movies. It's quite another if its quest
to protect its copyright interests harms an idea that is still in its
earliest stages. The industry tried and failed to kill the VCR. Let's
hope it fails this time as well.
TRASHING HISTORY. The
Boston Globe reports today that time
is running out for the
historic Gaiety Theatre. In October, Kristen Lombardi wrote a
comprehensive piece on this outrage
for the Boston Phoenix.
ABOUT TIME. The Boston
Herald reports today that the US attorney's office has begun a
criminal
investigation into the
leaks and cost overruns at the Big Dig. Maybe there's nothing there.
But this has got to be looked at.
MOVING ON. Bay
Windows, which covers
the city's gay and lesbian community, has a new editor - Susan
Ryan-Vollmar, the former news editor of the Phoenix.
Susan
makes the announcement on
her weblog.
posted at 11:05 AM |
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1 Comments:
The entertainment industry isn't targeting technology, only sites that post links to copyrighted material. Podcasters can post torrent links with impunity.
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
