It really is war out there. I just moderated a panel at the NY Bar Assn on P2P.
RIAA: Copyright law is about control. Other Guys: Copyright law is about encouraging innovation.
RIAA: Copyright infringement is immoral and is destroying small songwriters. Other Guys: The content industries should embrace online business models.
I had to be a very active moderator, so I couldn't take notes. All I could do was write words in the margin of my pages — words like “democracy,” and “respect,” and “infringement machine.” I didn't have to actually yell at any point, but it was close.
Yikes.
The audience had a lot of questions too. The questions seemed to be coming from people who weren't very sympathetic to the record labels. But, again, I couldn't take notes — I was too busy keeping the panelists from jumping down the questioners' throats.
I can report that before things got really rhetorical Don Verrilli clearly said that he's proposing a Sony test that's narrower than the Aimster proportionality test (he'd protect a “business that is substantially unrelated to infringement”). He's also very sure that there is a great deal of evidence in the record about Grokster's bad behavior — planning their business based on infringement, that kind of thing.
Adam Eisgrau responded to Verrilli on both these points, saying that Don's test would cast a pall on innovation, and that all of this “evidence” was under seal. Adam also pointed to the DiMA brief [pdf] and asked whether the RIAA would agree to the very reasonable test proposed there (they did not respond). Sonia Katyal made some very strong points about the risks to creativity posed by a fee-for-transaction approach to content, and the dangers of getting rid of fair use.
After the final bell, we all retired to our various corners and then went out into the rainy night.