I just read my regular news letter "Suit Watch" from Doc Searls, and what he had to say about the MGM v. Grokster case. The outcome is highly worrying as it threatens anyone who creates software that may indeed be used for illegal purposes, even if there is significant evidence of properly intended use.

Cory Doctrow has made the situation clear with these thoughts As quoted from Docs newsletter: 

   "This item" is "Supreme Court Strikes a Blow Against P2P Sharing: The
   Real Victim: American Innovation", by Cory Doctorow, in Popular
   Science. Cory explains:

     The second you show a hint of "inducement," you open your company
     up to having a court pick over the bones of every e-mail from every
     engineer, every call and every PowerPoint presentation, looking for
     evidence of thought-crime: Have you had a subversive thought while
     designing this? Did it ever occur to you that you could have made
     it a little clunkier and, in so doing, made it less infringing? Two
     companies that ship the same product face different liability based
     on whether one of them had an engineer who told her manager that
     she thought she could make it harder to infringe copyright merely
     by doubling the cost of development.

This is a very sad day for America. With attitudes like this - it wont belong before the developing world countries which don't have these hangups, will be wiping the floor with us all, because they will be light weight, agile, and completely void of this kind of baggage - and so they should, if we're stupid enough to let it happen.

Posted by PiersHarding at July 7, 2005 11:08 AM