Ernest was kind enough to let me add my two cents here as a guest blogger over the next couple of days. I'm a writer (author of the new book Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation) and executive director of Ourmedia.org.

As I was driving my car this morning and news came of the Grokster decision, a knot tightened in my stomach. Now that I've had a chance to read most of the decision and the accompanying commentary, the knot has loosened a bit.

It looks like I come down somewhere in the middle of all the opinions flying about. I don't quite see it as the sweeping victory for content and technology that Susan Crawford suggests, nor do I see it as the setback for innovation as the EFF's Fred von Lohmann posits.

I think we need to look at the High Court's ruling (the theory), but also its potential impact in the real world (the practice).

The balancing test laid out by Justice Souter strikes me as reasonable. In Darknet, I criticize companies like Grokster and Kazaa, whose business models are built on copyright infringement. A test that sets a standard for making companies responsible if their business model actively induces infringement seems to strike the right balance.

But:

We know how Hollywood plays this game. It doesn't need to win in court in order to achieve its ends. What's unsettling is that, as we've seen time and time again, Hollywood merely has to file enough lawsuits to send a startup's legal bills into the stratosphere in order to muscle it into abandoning cutting-edge technologies that the studios don't like. Remember ReplayTV, which let people share a copyrighted program with 15 other people for one time only?

We're already beginning to see some fallout: In a Washingon Post chat today a reader asked: "Should I now turn off the music sharing option on iTunes? We have a network in my office with about a dozen regular users."

This is the danger, that we'll all be forced to use our devices on terms dictated by Hollywood. Apple has already made its iTunes music sharing service much less useful and user-friendly since it was introduced about two years ago. It may now dumb it down even more.

I'd like to ask Ernest what he meant earlier today when he wrote: "I do think this may turn out to be a significant victory for technology providers in general." Those who invest in future p2p startups may be a bit more reluctant to do so this morning, regardless of the court's language.