Arrow, Becker, and Levitt on Grokster

How is that for heavyweights?  You can add William Landes, Kevin Murphy, and Steve Shavell — among others — to the list.

Here is their Amicus brief on the Grokster case coming before the Supreme Court.  (Here is a more general list of amicus briefs on the case.)  Their bottom line, however, is general rather than concrete:

They argue that indirect liability often makes economic sense.  If a file-sharing service can distinguish and police illegal files at low cost, that service should not be able to hide behind the 1984 Sony Betamax decision (i.e., the mere existence of non-infringing uses for a technology implies no liability).  Furthermore we should consider whether P2P services offer real benefits above and beyond fully legal alternatives, such as iTunes.  They stress that previous courts have failed to ask these key questions.

I’ve argued similar points myself, but my doubts grow.  I worry we cannot find a standard of indirect liability with clear lines.  Just how easy must it be to monitor illegal behavior and how hard must Grokster try?  Most likely all the variables lie along a relatively smooth continuum.

And who else can be indirectly liable?  File-sharing through iPods, email, blogs, and instant messaging is larger than you think.  36 million Americans admit to having shared files in this manner. 

"All these internet technologies share this common mass-copying capability: e-mail, web servers, web browsers, basic hard drives," said Jason Schultz, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represents StreamCast Networks. "There’s no principal distinction between (P2P) and other internet technologies in the way it’s designed.

Read more here

Is the question which level of technology can police illegal file sharing and copying most easily?  This might not be Grokster at all, since they have only an indirect link to the downloaded files.  Such a "least cost" approach might result in a monitoring chip put into all hard drives.  Yikes. 

Does Grokster supply any economically useful product that the legitimate services don’t?  Well, how about free files for those who wouldn’t otherwise pay for them?  If we approach the problem in a utilitarian manner, we can’t flinch from this conclusion.

My current best guess is that an economic approach — however correct in general terms — won’t come up with any new solutions we can live with.  We may be stuck with the Sony case after all.

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