A Copyfighter’s Musings

The 9th Circuit will hear the Grokster appeal on Tuesday (if you want to attend, see details here).  I have written quite a bit  about it before.  (Update) See Donna and Frank for more.

For a class this semester, I got to take a lot of these pieces and put them all together into a longer paper: “Protecting Sony and the Internet: A Discussion and Critique of Imposing Harsher Secondary Copyright Infringement Rules to Inhibit Peer-to-Peer File-Sharing” (in RTF format and some poor HTML).  Right now, the HTML version is not hyperlinked up, but I did extensive footnotes, so there are plenty of pointers to other resources.

I wrote it for an audience that doesn’t really know about these issues, has little technical knowledge, and has some general legal knowledge.  If you know a lot or a little about the case, I hope that it will be informative. What I tried to do was synthesize arguments about what is valuable about the Internet with arguments about why Sony is a good rule, and then look at that in relation to the negligence rule approach.  In doing so, I hope I have adequately drawn on, fleshed out, and added to those other arguments.

This is very much a draft.  There are some things I like a lot about it, some things not so much.  Some of you out there have already given me some very helpful comments, many of which I have unfortunately not had time to incorporate – in any case, thanks very much for the help.  Hopefully I’ll be able to come back to this sooner rather than later and add some more pieces (particularly, it needs more balance with a fuller exploration of the negligence approach counterarguments, among other things – but see for yourself).  If you have comments, please do send them along.

Filed by Derek Slater at 10:51 am under General news
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