New York Entertainment and Small Business Law Including LLCs, Securities, Contracts, and Intellectual Property

As many already know, U2′s Bono wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about “10 ideas that might make the next 10 years more interesting, healthy or civil.”

Bono devoted only three paragraphs of the op-ed to the subject of intellectual property, but those three paragraphs enraged many people. Bono argues that (1) “we’re just a few years away from being able to download an entire season of “24” in 24 seconds”; (2) file sharing hurts “fledgling songwriters who can’t live off ticket and T-shirt sales”; (3) service providers benefit from this “reverse Robin Hooding” and ISPs “swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business”; and (4) the ISPs should be responsible for tracking content: “We’re the post office, they tell us; who knows what’s in the brown-paper packages? But we know from America’s noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China’s ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it’s perfectly possible to track content.”

Of course, it was the fourth claim that angered many, and it’s easy to see why. Bono draws an implicit moral comparison between child pornography and downloading mp3s, and then goes on to hold up China’s censorship of the internet as an example of what American ISPs should be doing. Both are dubious assertions. The first is a bit underhanded — Bono doesn’t draw a direct link between child pornography and file-sharing, but the association is made nonetheless. The second assertion, concerning China’s censorship, is surprising coming from a man who has devoted his later career to spreading human rights. My guess is that this is not something he thought over before he had it published.

Many have responded to the op-ed. Below is list:

Andrew Heaney of TalkTalk: Heaney makes several good points, one of which is that ISPs do not make money from file-sharing; to the contrary, the extra bandwith required actually increases ISP’s costs. In addition, “there are dozens of applications and tools out there which allow people to view content for free and no amount of snooping can detect it.”

Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge: Sohn argues that Bono’s advocacy for stricter intellectual property laws actually runs contrary to many of Bono’s professed beliefs. She cites studies indicating that intellectual property laws principally benefit industrialized nations and stifle innovation.

Larry Downes at Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society takes issue with the child pornography connection. He writes “most federal and state efforts at solving that scourge at least in the online world have been so broad and clumsy that they instantly fail First Amendment scrutiny. ” He lists many of the these blunders and points out that “The U.S. has the most vibrant, free and innovative Internet because we don’t have gatekeepers in the middle of the network.”

Danny O’Brien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation draws attention to Bono’s contradictory efforts to make drugs more available to developing countries by loosening patent protections.

Mike Masnick of TechDirt lists some of the bands who have successfully adapted to changes in the music industry, and takes apart Bono’s claims that ISP make money from file-sharing.

Former Nirvana Bassist Krist Novoselic came out on the side of  Bono but his comments add little to the discussion. The TechDirt response is here.