Part One , Part Two (1 hr 15 min total)
Sony is an open principle. Its instantiation in P2P solves a problem of the Net. Suppose you are a creator in the Net, with access to cyberspace through a tiny node. Perhaps you live in a faraway land on the other side of the globe. Perhaps you are an inmate in a prison in Jamaica with access to the net through the prison’s tiny node. You create a blog. You use accessible digital tools to make a set of bits (text, audio, or video). Perhaps you use an old Sony camera or recorder and a hand-me-down computer in the prison lab. You sing your song or speak your poem. You put it up, creative commons. Dream of what can happen. Your art is open to the world. Imagine it catches fire, viral focus of mass global attention.
Not so fast. Disaster strikes. Your site is overwhelmed with hits. You have made your tiny node the target of a self-created DOS Attack. Your fuse blows. Bang!!!! You are down — flow of your message terminatated.
Enter p2p.
p2p solves this problem. p2p enables a single node to spread its digits far and wide, without being overwhelmed. This is the substance of freedom of speech in cyberspace, a kind of first amendment of the Net. This is media democracy, every node capable of communication with every other.
This is a substantial non-infringing use.
When new communications technologies come to mass hands, first uses often include porn and petty crime. So it has been with p2p. But with passage of time, people learn to how to use newly available capabilities to express themselves. Creativity explodes. Blogspace is now exploding with expressive creativity.
The Sony Principle establishes Law’s openness to the future. It calls for gauging the utility of new technology not merely as a function of current disruption of established interests but according a future with uses not yet presently evolved.
The question before the Court, at least in one form, is whether the elegance of the Sony Principle should be qualified to require communication technologies and businesses to filter for copyrighted material.
eon