Some time in the next month the copyright world may (or may not) reel from the Supreme Court's decision in the Grokster case.

The facts on their face are as favorable as the plaintiffs can make them. Grokster is all about making money for itself off the property of others. Its business model is to sell ads, including adware (sometimes a polite word for spyware and malware). It hoses both sides of every transaction. And the software really does little more than a good FTP server (with an automated database) would.

The vast majority of Grokster's use is driven by hoarding. People fear losing access to the music they love (or might love). So they load up, until they have gigs-and-gigs of it they have to haul around. (Thanks to Moore's Law of storage this gets lighter and less expensive over time, but it still has to be kept.)

The hoarding in turn is driven by the industry's threats. Threats of rising prices. Threats of lawsuits. Threats of copy-protected CDs.

The market solution to the facts is already in the pipeline. Many have proposed the idea of taxing people for unlimited access to the industry's wares and in fact schemes like Yahoo's Music Unlimited work just that way. Pay the "tax" (which starts at $5/month but could go up subject to negotiations with the industry) and download all you want. No need to hoard. Stop paying and all your files magically disappear. (The genie is found in Microsoft's DRM.)

More on the jump.

Apple's iTunes offers a different model. It's a price many find reasonable for each song you download. It carries its own DRM, with slightly different rules. Many buyers don't know it exists until it bites them, according to surveys, but if you're just running tunes between your hard drive and your iPod you should be OK.

The real danger from the court siding with industry doesn't lie in the content market, but in the technology market.

To rule for the plaintiffs the court gives content veto power over the direction technology takes. In effect it makes the Internet illegal, because file-sharing is inherent in all Internet protocols. I have copies of lots of copyrighted materials in my Web cache, and so do you. E-mail attachments are often copyrighted files. This is not only unacceptable but completely impractical, because technology increasingly is outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. government.

There's no right side in this case, but maybe there is a way for the court to split this baby in half. That is to look at the business model of the technology service being offered. A "content service" model should be required to gain permission from the data it's serving. ISPs don't have that. They offer a utility. Products, whether browsers, e-mail clients or DVD players don't have that. Grokster does have that.

Find Grokster liable based on the specifics of its business model. Technology should never be enjoined. Business models can be.