The Curse of the Missing Clause - Ben Hammersley: There was time, not all that long ago, when any mention of the internet in the press was followed by an explanatory clause. The Internet comma the global network of computers etc etc etc. The clause, and the capital I, are long gone. We don’t need to explain what the internet is, or what the funny http:// thing at the bottom of the article means. Even the BBC can confidently state “for more on this, go to bbc dot c.o. dot u.k. slash radio four” and not have to explain just what the hell it’s talking about. In less than a decade, this is an incredible change.
But now we need to add a new clause. There’s something missing from sentences that needs to be replaced, lest we all get the wrong idea. That clause is in the US.
So, filesharing applications are now liable to new legal contraints. Yes. In the US. Not here. Not in China. Not in India. Not across the majority of the world. The Supreme Court of the United States of America may have made a silly ruling, or it may not, but it did it in the US.
Declaring filesharing illegal across the net because it’s illegal in the US is like declaring the web broken because it’s censored in China. While developers in the US are being hamstrung by their courts, the developers in the warm and cheap places are getting busy. If you really care that your software was written in the US, then the Grokster case is quite a big deal. If not, you just shrug and move on. The rest of the world’s a big place. They make software there too.