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December 12, 2004
Cause & effect
Are the proprietors of file-sharing services responsible for copyright infringement? Are the producers of violent movies responsible for copycat acts of violence? These questions seem to me categorically different from this one: Are cigarette manufacturers responsible for tobacco-related deaths? The difference is that cigarettes have only one purpose—to be smoked—and the lethal effects of that smoking are well established. (More difficult to answer is this one: Are gun manufacturers responsible for murder committed with their product? Depends on what kind of gun. I say this even though I'd be thrilled to live in a world without any guns at all.)
Back to my first question: if (in March 2005) the Supreme Court rules that file-sharing technologies are responsible for users' copyright infringement, we're looking at some dark days for new media. Among other (and more serious) things, it will provide a legal precedent for all the emerging commonplaces of print capitalism, e.g., email and IM are destroying sentence-level correctness (or at least a respect for it).
Posted by senioritis at December 12, 2004 06:57 AM