It's Like Déjà Vu All Over Again

Background to this morning’s post at: The Huffington Post

The morning of Monday, June 27, 2005, the last day of the U.S. Supreme Court session, a unanimous court ruling in the case of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios v. Grokster Ltd. was handed down. It was a victory for the entertainment industry and a potentially damaging blow to peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing firms as the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that P2P firms can be sued if they encourage the use of their products to illegally swap copyrighted music and movies.

However, it was the precedent-setting Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios 464 US 417, 104 S. Ct. 774, 78 L. Ed. 2d 574 (1984) "Betamax" decision that enabled the motion-picture industry to reach levels of staggering profitability. This decision held that as long as a technology had a substantial non-infringing use, it would not be prohibited under law or liable in civil copyright infringement suits.

History shows that conventional media reflexively shuns novel technology. In 1908, a music publisher sued a player piano company. The Supreme Court ruled that making piano rolls was not close enough to publishing music to be prohibited. Now, The Maginot Mind, would like reactions from its readers as to the following:

The American Society of Composers and Publishers (ASCAP) and the Music Publishers’ Protective Association (MPPA) have now made it illegal to broadcast records. This may sound odd, but the very idea of broadcasting music from disc seems not only cheap but trivial, and above all commercial suicide. Why would the radio want to promote sales of its rival, the record business? Conversely, why would the record industry want to help out the popularity of radio by allowing discs to be used for broadcast, giving the radio stations free programming?