Silicon Insider: Hollywood's Shallow Victory
July 7, 2005 -- -- The entertainment industry celebrated its victory last week before the Supreme Court as the long-awaited triumph of the traditional media over the upstart new media.
Instead, it may prove to be a last hurrah.
Just to summarize, for all of you readers who may have been distracted by the other big Supreme Court ruling -- the one that turns over all private property in the United States to rich developers -- the Supremes sided with the big names of traditional entertainment against two music and video download services, Grokster and StreamCast Networks (the suit was filed by MGM). Hollywood can now sue these two outfits for copyright infringement; or, more likely, just throw enough lawyers at them until they bleed to death.
In his decision, (the soon-to-be-homeless) Justice Souter stated that, "The unlawful objective [of the two companies] is unmistakable." And he is probably right: the whole download industry has always been a sort of nudge-nudge-wink-wink to the illegal theft of intellectual properties of the movie and music industries -- kind of like giving a printing press to teenagers and making them promise to never, ever print fake IDs or phony report cards.
But even if it is difficult to feel much sympathy for the Groksters of the world, it's even harder to share in the triumph of Old Entertainment. They have won this round, but nobody seriously believes they've accomplished anything against the real problem of media piracy. On the contrary, having killed Napster, and now Grokster, Hollywood has effectively crushed the one part of the download world it could actually negotiate with, even co-opt. Now music and video piracy have been driven down into the anarchic underworld of freelancers and freeware -- where there is no hope for collaboration, no one to threaten, no organization to sue. Hollywood is going to look back on the last couple years as the good times, when piracy was still a tangible opponent, not an immense and amorphous shadow opponent.
If you want to see Hollywood's biggest enemy now, look into the face of your teenage child … or the mirror. Every teenager I know casually downloads pirate movies and music without a second thought. And I can guarantee you that somebody on my block, and on every other block here in Silicon Valley, has a source for any bootleg first-run movie delivered within hours after that film's opening day.
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