[npc] June Supreme Court Ruling Taking Toll on Music Sharing

["Dennis Moore" <clayboy56>]

This is in today's Washington Post. On there website I found an interesting
link too: http://p2pexeem.net/ for Peer-to-Peer Exemplary Empire.

>  June Supreme Court Ruling Taking Toll on Music Sharing
> 
>  By Frank Ahrens
> 
>   A year ago, a Web site called eDonkey was an arch-nemesis of the music
> industry. Like other sites with names like Kazaa and LimeWire and the
> original Napster back in 1999, eDonkey allowed users to swap songs for
> free over the Internet. Sharing, users said. Stealing, the music industry
> replied.
> 
>  This week, Sam Yagan, the inventor of eDonkey, told a Senate Judiciary
> panel that his site has been forced to do an about-face and start charging
> its users for songs, a significant victory for the music industry and a
> radical change for the tens of millions of downloaders who have never paid
> for a song.
> 
>  Like Kazaa and a dozen others, eDonkey is a peer-to-peer or "P2P"
> service, meaning users trade songs for free among each other, rather than
> downloading them from a main server, as was the case with Napster.
> 
>  The Supreme Court has forced all P2P services -- most of which sprang up
> after Napster was shut down by the government in 2001 -- to face a choice:
> Go legitimate, as the music industry says, shut down, or move outside U.S.
> jurisdiction. The impact could be enormous: BigChampagne LLC, which
> measures online media, estimates there are 10 million P2P users online
> globally at any one time.
> 
>  The Australia-based Kazaa, the most-used P2P site, claimed more than
> 820,000 downloads last week and nearly 400 million during its four-year
> lifespan. But even Kazaa's parent company has been found liable for its
> users' copyright infringement by an Australian court.
> 
>  In the new world, eDonkey users will have to start ponying up a yet-
> undetermined fee for each song, and performers and songwriters will get a
> cut of that fee in royalties. EDonkey will likely avoid both a crippling
> lawsuit from the music industry and a shutdown notice from the federal
> government.
> 
>  The turnaround is the result of a June Supreme Court ruling that sites
> such as eDonkey, Kazaa and Grokster are endorsing theft of digital
> content, such as songs and movies. Emboldened, the Recording Industry
> Association of America sent out cease-and-desist orders to many P2P sites
> earlier this month.
> 
>  Now, sites such as eDonkey -- which tend to be small businesses -- are
> facing fleets of lawyers with the law on their side.
> 
>  In the simplest terms, the P2P sites will begin using a filter to keep
> users from trading copyrighted songs and movies that have not been
> licensed for sale. This essentially reduces the authorized song-sharing
> library from millions of songs to hundreds of thousands, about the size of
> Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes music store, because many artists and record
> companies still do not allow digital sales of their songs.
> 
>  For many, the seismic shift is a business opportunity.
> 
>  Michael Bebel was the chief executive of the legal version of Napster,
> launched in 2003. Now, he's the new chief executive of Mashboxx, a
> Virginia Beach-based company that makes software that pays rights-holders
> for their works when purchased over a legal P2P network.
> 
>  "The [cease-and-desist] orders clearly hit their mark," Bebel said at an
> RIAA-sponsored event at the Cannon House Office Building Tuesday night
> that showcased authorized file-sharing services. Bebel's boss, Wayne
> Rosso, was once the head of Grokster. Now, Mashboxx is considering
> acquiring Grokster.
> 
>  Where some see opportunity in the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling,
> though, others see bad news for music fans.
> 
>  "They're not getting their needs met" by authorized P2P services, said
> Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which
> proposes a blanket-licensing system that would let consumers get music
> from any service -- authorized or not -- for a monthly fee. The system is
> opposed by Bainwol, who called it "an excuse for avoiding the central
> reality that you've got to go legitimate."
> 
>  For von Lohmann, the legitimization of P2P sites is meaningless unless
> more artists and record labels allow more of their songs to be sold in
> digital form.
> 
>  "We'll still have bad inventory, high prices and restrictions for playing
> [songs] on your iPod," he said. "The solution to each of those has been in
> the hands of the record labels from day one."
> 
>  Or, as Yagan put it on Wednesday: "I cannot fathom how many paid
> downloads we could have sold on eDonkey if the record labels had granted
> us licenses to sell their content."
> 
> 
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> C 2004 The Washington Post Company