The Supreme Court’s MGM v. Grokster ruling came and went without comment from if:book (we miss you Ben). When I heard about the decision, I told myself: Kim, you should write a post about that. But my only thought on the subject was, So what? The ruling can’t stop the change that is underway. Then I ran across this marvelous William Gibson quote: “We legislate after the fact, in a perpetual game of catch-up, as best we can, while our new technologies redefine us.” That’s from a recent article in Wired entitled “God’s Little Toys: Confessions of a cut & paste artist” He also had this to say about the record industry:

Today, an endless, recombinant, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of creative product (another antique term?). To say that this poses a threat to the record industry is simply comic. The record industry, though it may not know it yet, has gone the way of the record. Instead, the recombinant (the bootleg, the remix, the mash-up) has become the characteristic pivot at the turn of our two centuries.