A report from the file-swapping front

Verizon has a point about the disputed subpoena, even if you believe – as I do – that the recording industry is fighting the good fight to keep large-scale file swapping from eviscerating the intellectual property rights of musicians.

Verizon has a point about the disputed subpoena, even if you believe – as I do – that the recording industry is fighting the good fight to keep large-scale file swapping from eviscerating the intellectual property rights of musicians.

Verizon is balking at a judge’s decision issued earlier this year – and reaffirmed by him last week – that it must provide the identity of a Verizon Online customer to lawyers for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).The customer was allegedly running a Napster-like service. The ISP is not claiming that it has no obligation to disclose such information – it’s done so in the past, for example, in spam-related cases. Instead, Verizon contends such subpoenas should require more stringent court oversight than was the case here.

The matter isn’t clear-cut, as can be gleaned from reading a Deloitte & Touche report on file-swapping issues at www.nwfusion.com.

Getting an ISP to cough up the identity of a customer should be difficult . . . not impossible, but difficult. This should be so not only because the customer has privacy rights, but also because ISPs deserve protection from trivial requests and fishing expeditions. Requiring that a subpoena seeker get a judge’s OK – as opposed to a court clerk’s rubber stamp – would strike a reasonable balance.

As for the broader issues regarding file-swappers, much remains unresolved.

The law is not of them, though, putting aside that subpoena dispute. The various theories defended over the years by music-swapping apologists have held up in court about as well as Iraq’s Elite Republican Guard did in Baghdad. And that has left the RIAA critics with a fallback position that boils down to something like this: “Sure, the courts have said these services are illegal if they aren’t licensed. And sure it’s not our money. But the recording industry ought to surrender anyway because, well, because tens of millions of people have downloaded free music and tens of millions of people can’t be wrong.”

Another argument holds that if someone in the industry would do this right – give music fans what they want, the way they want it, at a reasonable price – those fans who now filch their tunes would be perfectly willing to give up the freebies and pay.

However, as the Deloitte & Touche report notes, the pay services are proliferating and getting more attractive all the time, yet fewer than half a million people are ponying up for downloads. In other words, what people tell pollsters they’re willing to do and what they’re actually willing to do are not necessarily the same thing.

Which means the RIAA still has a huge problem to solve.

If you’re militant one way or the other on this issue, the Deloitte & Touche report is unlikely to sway you.

However, the reasonable middle might find it enlightening.

An editor throws down the gauntlet

The challenge from my editor was irresistible: “Paul, I challenge you to work this word into ‘Net Buzz.”

The editor gets that “word of the day” e-mail from Merriam-Webster. . . . He didn’t say I couldn’t make up stuff, so here goes:

“That last Blue Screen of Death will be the last Blue Screen of Death,” Jones shouted mere seconds before tossing his PC out the window in an act of cathartic defenestration that years later still draws whistles of approval any time network executives gather.

Defenestration dee-feh-nuh-STRAY-shun noun: a throwing of a person or thing out of a window.

You can toss comments and questions to buzz@nww.com