Pamela Samuelson has built a nice collection of pointers for her course on the legal and policy challenges of peer-to-peer technology. News angle: The Supreme Court is expected to announce its decision in the MGM v. Grokster case, as early as Monday. Steve Lohr at NYT has written a brief article: The mission of Mr. Glickman's trade group is to tilt the legal climate and public opinion as much in Hollywood's favor as possible -- to influence legislation, law enforcement and people's attitudes so that illicitly sharing copyrighted movies becomes more risky and less acceptable behavior. "My advice to Hollywood is to really start selling online," said Bram Cohen, the 29-year-old programmer who created the BitTorrent software. "They have nothing that vaguely competes with Netflix."
For every day that Hollywood spends sitting on its hands, film further fades in mindshare among the next generation. By the time they decide how to react, customers will have moved on. Hollywood is the new Broadway, and that's not a Good Thing. Consider the history of the musical: The decline of the Broadway musical had several causes. First and foremost, the competition of television soap operas, that catered to the same audience as the musical. Then the escalating production costs, that simply made it too risky a venture for entrepreneurs who could invest their money in more reliable ventures. In terms of "taste", the musical never truly managed to assimilate the new taste that developed with the advent of rock'n'roll, disco music and hip-hop. Somehow, the musical had successfully assimilated new genres (ragtime, jazz) up until the Sixties. In the Sixties, rock music introduced not only a new musical paradigm but also new forms of consumption (from Woodstock to the video clip) that were simply not compatible with the theatrical format. Finally, there certainly was a change in the national psyche: as the Cold War forced the USA to abandon its childhood and entered its adulthood (a difficult time of subtle strategizing and risky undertakings on a global scale), the musical had a hard time abandoning its childhood, and eventually fell out of synch with the rest of society.
When I say GWOT, do you think Hollywood? No, I didn't think so. The Challenge of P2P | INFOSYS 296A-2 | SPRING 2005 | 
