Hollywood (CA) - At the Entertainment Media Expo in Hollywood, the two opposing sides of the peer to peer debate squared off in dueling keynote speeches. Up first was Stanford Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig who argued that big media companies are using the law to stifle creativity. George Borkowski, former acting director of Litigation for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), had a different viewpoint, saying that the P2P networks are for pure piracy.

Each side had twenty minutes to state their case, and Lessig and Borkowski were surprisingly civil to each other. Both are no strangers to the courtroom, as Lessig has testified in and defended many intellectual property cases, most notably Eldred vs. Ashcroft in 2003. Borkowski represented the major record labels in 2000 against Napster.

Lessig said that there is no concrete term for copyright violations and that users of new technologies are often called "pirates" by businesses that can’t adapt. "With the piano player, radio, cable TV and in the Sony Betamax case, copyright holders always have battled pirates. But the pirates have always won," says Lessig.

According to Lessig, the first copyright fight may have been song writers against the piano players. Rather than change their business model, the writers took legal action against players and demanded royalties. Today, we are seeing the same battle between record companies and the peer to peer networks such as Bittorrent and EDonkey.

"We need to dial back the obsessive control of the media companies," stated Lessig.

In his rebuttal, Borkowski talked about his battle against the P2P services and doesn’t buy the argument that P2P networks have reasonable intentions, for example a distribution of legal videos or Linux ISOs. "There is copying [of songs/movies] 90 percent of the time. This is outright massive copying," Borkowski said.

Borkowski admitted that rights holders do sometimes go overboard : For example, he mentioned a case between Universal Music against Mattel in a 1997 lawsuit over the song "Barbie Girl". Mattel argued that their Barbie doll line was being misused by the band Aqua in their parody song and "this was a case where rights holders took an extreme position," says Borkowski. The music labels won that case because the Courts ruled that the song was a parody that fell under Fair Use laws.

But according to Borkowski, the P2P networks don’t provide parody or additional content. "This is out and out copying, with no cool snippets added."

Even though the RIAA has lost several cases against P2P networks, the latest win against Grokster makes Borkowski happy : "Finally, the court brought things back into a balance."