Grokster Case
The Supreme Court ruled today in favor of the entertainment industry in the case of file sharing. It found that companies can be guilty of promoting illegal file sharing, even if the file sharing is done by individuals accessing their services. It will be interesting to see how this will affect peer-peer file sharing for the future. Cory Doctorow offers an editorial in Popular Science. See the NY Times (registration required) for a story with links to video and the complete text of the decision. Probably bad news for free sharing services, maybe good news for itunes and others (now including Napster) that offer fee services. I’m sure there will be serveral editorials over the next few days with insights into both sides of the debate.
What does seem clear is that there is plenty of consumer demand for media and information that consumers can control and use at their leisure. I do not see this trend reversing at all. Extension will need to look at their delivery systems and create ways of providing information to a customer base that is used to having choices.