Mark Cuban: tread lightly in Grokster case

Digital Music blog:

Mark Cuban weighs in mightily on the Supreme Court file-sharing case. While slamming the copy-protection on DVDs, Mark cites his “law of unintended consequences,” by which bad litigation can inasdvertantly squelch future technology, because future inventions are always unimaginable in the present moment. For that reason, Mark argues (as do many others), laws should tread lightly and with caution on classes of technology, such as file-sharing and P2P apps. Software doesn’t commit crimes, people do—so Mark wraps up his long and impassioned argument. He also points out that we should take a large view of digitized content. If you were to add up all the personally owned content (pictures, home movies, etc.), it would dwarf corporate-owned content by an unknown but considerable margin. So, it is inappropriate for the content corporations to determine legislation that harms personal distribution of private content—a path for P2P that is relatively unexplored to date.