As Ruling Nears on File Sharing, Net Specialists Worry(re. other services)

New York Times
As Ruling Nears on File Sharing, Net Specialists Worry
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: March 17, 2005


SAN DIEGO, March 16 - As the bitter debate over computer file sharing heads toward the Supreme Court, the pro-technology camp is growing increasingly anxious.

Some technologists warn that if the court decides in favor of the music and recording industries after hearing arguments in the MGM v. Grokster case on March 29, the ruling could also stifle a proliferating set of new Internet-based services that have nothing to do with the sharing of copyrighted music and movies at issue in the court case.

Some of those innovations were on display here at the Emerging Technologies Conference, attended by about 750 hardware and software designers. The demonstrations included Flickr, a Canadian service that has made it possible for Web loggers and surfers to easily share and catalog millions of digital photographs.

And Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief of executive of Amazon.com, demonstrated a set of new features in the company's A9 search engine designed to make it extremely simple for Web users to share searches specially tailored to mine everything from newspapers to yellow pages to catalogs of electronics parts.

Software designers from iFabricate, a small company in Emeryville, Calif., displayed a new Web service intended to make it simple for home inventors to share instructions for complex do-it-yourself garage construction projects....There was also a demonstration of Wikipedia, a volunteer-run online encyclopedia effort that now has generated 1.5 million entries in 200 languages....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/17/technology/17soft.html