New York Business Lawyers

Trying to figure out the point where piracy ends and legitimate business begins is more alchemy than modern science. For the two are like serpent heads sharing the same body. Now with increasingly regularity the entertainment industry players are adding “joint venture” to “litigation” on their checklist for dealing with the “pirates.” Exhibit A is Dutch band “Beep! Beep! Back up the Truck” releasing its entire catalogue on Mininova, a well known torrent site with candy store like access to any illegal content you desire (which is not to deny the site has also greatly expanded the reach and appeal of unsigned artists.) Exhibit B is Facebook’s recent acceptance (though this was very short lived) of the Pirate Bay’s new and ready for prime time Facebook app.

If the lack of a “shock and awe” reaction from both Facebook and the industry comes as a surprise, it shouldn’t. As traditional means of shaping the public’s habits to conform to the pre internet yesteryear (i.e., litigation) have all but failed, these technologies have become more firmly rooted in the public entertainment consciousness. There are very few teens left who don’t think of torrents as a natural way to hit their recommended daily content allowance.

Now get your mind to gander the possibility of Facebook’s 175 million users naively and/or intentionally superpoking themselves into sharing illegal content, through the easy-breezy convenience of an app. And why turn someone into a zombie someone when you can share torrent trackers for that really rad American Idol DVD box set? The thought’s enough to immediately bork your brain.

Well Facebook ultimately decided to bork the Pirate Bay app. And furthermore, Facebook is actively, but quietly, blocking all Pirate Bay torrent links. But the point to note is that this was all done very “hush hush” to limited fanfare. One must recognize that although Facebook covered itself as a legal matter from having anything but absolute authority to reject any app for nearly any reason that does not cover it in terms of the potential user fallout. As Facebook has discovered already, its users are sometimes a very vocal and cranky bunch when it comes to unilateral changes to the Facebook ecosystem that were nonetheless “legally authorized.”

The fact is that the pirate bay and torrent tracker sites in general can be put to legitimate and legal tasks, as with the Mininova example above. So users can easily come to see these actions as curbing their “right” (yes, I am aware that the users really have few rights outside the Facebook terms of services agreement) to communication and self expression. What if the management becomes seen as a corporate tool for the man along the lines of the RIAA? This is difficult terrain to navigate, but it is the flipside of having an open and porous social media platform with an application platform layered within.

Hence the management of social media ventures are taking a more nuanced (though probably not sophisticated, as we are all bumping our heads in the dark) position on copyright infringement. Rather than immediately chase down the end