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John Perry Barlow Declaration for Defendants

in MGM et al. v. Grokster et al (Jan. 22, 2002)


ANDREW P. BRIDGES, State Bar No. 122761
RICHARD NESSARY, State Bar No. 180682
JENNIFER A. GOLINVEAUX, State Bar No. 203056
TERRI Y. CHEN, State Bar No. 209854
ALEXANDER D. MACGILLIVRAY, State Bar No. 212770
WILSON SONSINI GOODRICH & ROSATI
Professional Corporation
650 Page Mill Road
Palo Alto, CA 94304-1050
Telephone: (650) 493-9300
Facsimile: (650) 493-6811

CINDY A. COHN, State Bar No. 145997
FRED VON LOHMANN, State Bar No. 192657
ROBIN D. GROSS, State Bar No. 200701
ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION
454 Shotwell Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
Telephone: (415) 436-9333 x 123
Facsimile: (415) 436-9993

JOSEPH R. TAYLOR, State Bar No. 129933
JEFFREY K. COMPTON, State Bar No. 142969
LINER YANKELEVITZ SUNSHINE & REGENSTREIF
3130 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 200
Santa Monica, CA 90403
Telephone: (310) 881-2192
Facsimile: (310) 453-5901

Attorneys for Defendants
MusicCity.com, Inc. (now known as StreamCast Networks, Inc.) and MusicCity Networks, Inc.


UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

CENTRAL DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA, WESTERN DIVISION


METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER STUDIOS INC., et al.,

Plaintiffs,

vs.

GROKSTER, LTD., et al.,

Defendants.

Case No. 01-08541 SVW (PJWx)

DECLARATION OF JOHN PERRY BARLOW IN SUPPORT OF MUSICCITY.COM, INC.'S AND MUSICCITY NETWORKS, INC.'S MOTION FOR PARTIAL SUMMARY JUDGMENT


I, John Perry Barlow, hereby declare:

1. My name is John Perry Barlow. I reside in Pinedale, Wyoming.

2. I am a former song writer for the Grateful Dead and author of several articles on topics including intellectual property, civil liberties, and the digital economy.

3. Since May of 1998, I have been a Fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Prior to that, I was a Fellow with the Institute of Politics at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

4. I wrote songs for the band the Grateful Dead from 1971 until 1995. I continue to write songs individually and with other song writers to this day.

5. I have written for a vast diversity of publications, ranging from Communications of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) to The New York Times to Nerve. An article that I wrote in 1995 for Wired Magazine on the future of copyright, "The Economy of Ideas," is now taught in many law schools. I authored "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace," which has been widely distributed on the Internet and can be found on more than 20,000 sites. Partly as a consequence of that, I was called "the Thomas Jefferson of Cyberspace" by Yahoo Internet Life Magazine.

6. I regularly comment on information economics, digitized intellectual goods, cyber liberties, virtual community, electronic cash, cryptography policy, privacy, and the social, cultural, and legal conditions forming in Cyberspace. I am the vice-chair of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and also a member of the External Advisory Council of the National Computational Science Alliance.

7. In June of 1999, FutureBanker Magazine (an American Banker Publication) named me "One of the 25 Most Influential People in Financial Services," even though I am not really in financial services.

8. In my experience as a musician and an author, the more my works are traded among people, the more my career benefits.

9. I have no objection to my works being traded using Morpheus software or other peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing programs. I not only have no objection to, but I would also actively welcome and encourage, distribution of my works through use of Morpheus software or other peer-to-peer file sharing programs. I anticipate that peer-to-peer networks and direct file sharing software programs like Morpheus will provide enormous benefit to musicians and authors and will broaden our distribution opportunities. Morpheus and other similar programs are capable of improving distribution of my works and a wide variety of other works that are beneficial to society in many ways, whether they are entertainment works like mine, political or social commentary like mine, public domain documents, software, or other materials.

I declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of the United States of America that the foregoing is true and correct and that this declaration is executed in Salt Lake City, Utah on January 18, 2002.

______________________________
John Perry Barlow

[filed Jan. 22, 2002]

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