In the Grokster open thread below, Kevin writes in part:

>darknets and bittorrent, by their nature, would not be found guily of inducing infringement.

I'm fascinated by your conclusion here. Do others agree with this?

Much of my reading the past two days has centered not on the fine points of law but on how the Grokster decision will affect *me* as a technology entrepreneur.

I just came from a lunch where a very successful businessman and I spent 90 minutes hashing out the ideas that might be involved in forming a darknet grassroots media company - an encrypted social space where individuals could create, collaborate, communicate and share their own works of personal media, either publicly or privately. (I don't think he'll mind if I mention it here; let me know if you might be interested in taking part.)

The subject of infringement never came up, though we'll eventually have to address this central question:

Are providers of such a service *required* to put business rules into place that specifically prevents users from sharing copyrighted works? (It's a very difficult thing to accomplish in an age when hundreds of photographs, videos and mp3 files on your computer may have been created by you -- or by someone else. And, after all, you can always trade photos and mp3s and other files today by email, IM or a dozen other ways.)

Some of the darknet companies out there address this in different ways. Grouper, for example, will let you invite only a maximum of 30 people into any single social space, and it will let you exchange jpegs and video files, but not mp3s (you can, however, stream music to your peers).

What's your sense of what the rules are for technology vendors who want to provide these privacy tools and social spaces to individuals in the post-Grokster world? (And, if you offer an opinion, I won't hold you to it.)