Today the Supreme Court ruled on several pending cases, one of them was MGM v. Grockster. The court ruled in favor of MGM, stating that because Grockster “distributed a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, [it] is liable for the resulting acts of infringement.”

Ok, so after reading the opinion, I gotta say I agree with the Supreme Court. In response to the ruling, Edgar Bronfman, the CEO of Warner Entertainment Group, said, “The most important message from today’s historic decision is that progress and innovation do not have to come at the expense of recording artists, songwriters and the people who make their living in the entertainment industry. This important decision will allow artists and the creative community to prosper side by side with the technology industry” (emphasis mine).

This comment irks me.

The Sups allow that MGM would be justified if they decided to seek compensation, though they they also admit that it would be hard to determine how much should be awarded because of the nature of P2P networks (the judges point to the fact that there is no record of what was traded and that it’s not possible to track), but who would the money go to?

Would these big media companies award all of their artists the same amount of money? (I can’t imagine that being more than a few cents for each artist.) Or would they split it between all of the corporate entities with the individual artists receiving no compensation because they can’t determine to whom it should be divvied out? What do the artists gain from either of these scenarios? Nothing, is what I say.

If the big recording companies manage to completely stamp out illegal downloads, then the artists who will supposedly “prosper side by side with the technology industry” will probably lose even more because there is a large percentage of non-CD buying, lazy internet users out there who will never hear their music and subsequently not go see them play live. (And even that is a contentious point, really. The fact is that no one has, and will never have, solid statistics about who is illegally downloading and why they are doing it and what they would do if they couldn’t. Would they buy more CDs?)

The notion that the elimination of illegal downloading will substantially increase their sales (which is what I think is implied when the industry says, “we’ve lost 4 bazillion dollars to illegal downloading!”) is ludicrous. People using these networks will either a) simply stop trying to illegally download stuff because it’s too complicated or b) trade mp3s with friends through their websites or with portable digital media. There might be slightly less illegal trading going on, but I don’t think the number of people who actually go buy CDs will increase. The satisfaction of owning a CD, for me at least, is owning a physical object with particular packaging and not the content of the disc itself, which if I like it well enough will go on my computer anyway. It is also a symbol of my appreciation for a band.