Over at the Progress & Freedom Foundation blog, in Takedowns and Daiquiris: Viacom v. YouTube Hosts a Grokster Reunion, Tom Sydnor channels Ezekiel, laying waste the Free Culture Movement and taking no prisoners:

For example, the too-radical-even-for-Grokster gang at Public Knowledge signed the . . . amicus brief [defending YouTube]. So did the technologically oblivious Morpheus fans at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The Home Recording Rights Coalition also insisted that Sony “harbored” even blatant and deliberate piracy. And who can forget the vicious, sue-families-and-prosecute-students rhetoric of narcissistic consumer-haters like the Internet Archive, the American Library Association, and the Association of Research Libraries?

How telling that only these most extreme defenders of Grokster and Morpheus would blindly rush—yet again—to the defense of the seemingly deliberate wrongdoing of the founders of the original YouTube—the “video Grokster.

After this, ahem, relatively mild beginning, Tom gets rough, with an extensive analysis of the issues in the case and a ringing conclusion:

Bill Sykes, the villain of Oliver Twist, was both a fence and an inducer. Sykes wanted to profit by selling stolen goods. But Sykes knew that the penalties for stealing were too severe to justify risking his own neck. Sykes thus devised a scheme to profit from theft while offloading the worst of its risks upon others: he and his partner encouraged or duped children into doing the dirty work of actually stealing the goods that Sykes would then profitably fence. Dickens thought that was the most depraved and degenerate “business model” that adult humans could pursue.

Much has changed since Dickens wrote Oliver Twist, including the Supreme Court’s Sony decision, the development of the TCP/IP protocols, and the enactment of the DMCA. But nothing has changed the immorality of the “business model” of Bill Sykes. It remains criminal, wrong, and thuggish—even if pursued as a form of what the Grokster Defenders would call “Internet commerce” (p.14). Someday, more decisions like Napster, Aimster, Grokster, Fung, Usenet, and Lime Group may enable even the Grokster Defenders to perceive this.

But not yet. Consequently, Viacom v. YouTube is now “hosting” a backfiring, fact-free, logic-defying, and amoral amicus brief—a pathetic “class reunion” for the most radical defenders of the intentional, massive Internet piracy unanimously condemned by the Supreme Court in Grokster. Federal judges might thus remember that in Grokster, the Court reversed those district and circuit judges who made the fatal mistake of taking the Grokster Defenders seriously.

The piece is long, but well worth the time.