Sue KaZaa, Not the Customers?

Derek Slater and Ernie Miller (/.) (friends and colleagues) both look at what an unworkable idea this is, in response to the Wall Street Journal OpEd piece on this yesterday by Chicago Law Professor Douglas Lichtman.

Says Derek, under Lichtman's logic: ...every technology creator has to know specifically how the service should be used for legitimate purposes and design around those specific purposes, because putting out general purpose technologies will leave a company open to huge damages. In turn, users won't be able to come up with new, innovative, legitimate uses of new technology because they'll be strictly cabined within the uses the technology creator was thinking of. That, too, will hinder technology creation.

From Frank, a pointer to this Michelle Delio/Wired piece, Rude Awakening for File Sharers:

"My mom paid $29.95 for Kazaa and assumed she was using a legitimate service," said Marilyn Rodell, whose mother is being sued. "How was she supposed to know the difference between Kazaa and something like Pressplay where you pay $9.95 a month?"

"Kazaa has a very pretty, very professional-looking Web page. I paid them a fee and assumed it was a legitimate way to buy music," said Karyn Columbine, a Manhattan resident who insists she was "shocked and scared" when she discovered that the fee she paid to Kazaa didn't cover legal music downloads.

The answer to this is not about outlawing P2P technology per se. Maybe instead KaZaa's business practices are the problem, and so selling something like KaZaa, with a warning posted explicitly on their website that users of this service, if trading copyrighted materials, might be liable for the trading, uploading, etc. might be more reasonable for the average user.

Update 9/11/03 1pm: Lawrence Solum at Legal Theory Blog has more to say on this topic, including the posting of Lichtman's response to this discussion (he's put this in the comments, too).

Posted by Mary Hodder at September 11, 2003 07:26 AM