COMMENTARY–WASHINGTON–Should the people who invent technology be legally responsible for what other people do with it?
The Recording Industry Association of America thinks so. It recently sued four college students for running programs that create a searchable index of files on a local area network. Their offense: The utilities, which go by names like Phynd and FlatLan, are general-purpose tools that indiscriminately compile lists of copyrighted and non-copyrighted files that can be transferred from one machine to another.
The results of the RIAA’s action were predictable. Faced with the unpalatable prospect of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorneys’ fees defending themselves, the students quickly chose the lesser of two evils, handing over $12,000 and $17,000 each to the RIAA to settle the case.
This isn’t the first time the entertainment industry has tried to make inventors responsible for what people do with their creations. The most obvious example is the 1984 case of Sony v. Universal City Studios, in which the Supreme Court rejected an attempt to restrict the then-novel VCR after concluding it was quite “capable of substantial non-infringing uses.” (In a bit of historical irony, Sony Music Entertainment is one of the plaintiffs in the current lawsuit against the P2P services. And John Ashcroft, then-attorney general of Missouri, filed a brief siding with Hollywood against those nettlesome VCRs.)
If technology inventors are held liable, it’s difficult to imagine where to draw the line. The Google search engine arguably helps pirates find copies of software, and Usenet newsreaders–from Forte FreeAgent to the venerable tin and trn–surely aid and abet file-swapping on the alt.binaries hierarchy. FTP is often used to swap illicit files, the argument might go, and the ready availability of free Perl interpreters and C compilers accelerates the development process.
link to whole story here
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