[0wza]

A peculiar comparison to P2P. But I think I know what he's getting at. It's the idea of "enablement". As in, enabling easy infringement. But if my understanding is correct (it might not be), so long as there are alternative non-infringing uses that are significant, this hurdle, set by incumbent industries, can be overcome.

Perhaps good examples were analog cassette and video tapes. They enabled easy infringement. But they had so many beneficial uses, the courts were not persuaded by the incumbent industries. And Congress even created exceptions for personal use copying ("home taping") in the statute.

There is nothing inherently infringing about P2P, or even inherently enabling. Nothing says you have to use it to share bits with thousands of people or more. Back in the analog days millions of people made recordings and shared them with each other (i.e. people they knew: friends, colleagues, etc.), without being sued. It's only when some people tried to started businesses selling mass produced copies to the public (i.e. people they didn't know: customers) without authorization that they were sued. These "bootleggers" were, as I remember it, a very small percentage of total number of people using the available recording technology.

Not quite enough to keep an enormously useful technology like audio and video recording out of reach from the public.