By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

I went along to a dinner hosted by Mercora Wednesday. The event sounded interesting - it promised to discuss the impending MGM versus Grokster court case on file sharing.

Mercora, which offers music search and sharing services, lined up a good collection of music industry lawyers and others to discuss and promote the issue of legal file sharing.

Unfortunately, Mercora did not know when to stop. An attentive group of key journalists dutifully listened and scribbled notes. Then the salad arrived, and we listened and scribbled notes. Then the entree arrived and was dispatched, then it was time for desert and coffee, but the CEO stood up and said, now, let me show you the demo...

At which point I decided the time was better spent with my son and I left. And I hope others did so too. Giving up an evening to meet with company executives is asking a lot, but for Mercora to monopolize all of the evening is too much.

I don't mind giving up, say, half of the evening to listen to your pitches. But give me the second half to chat with my peers, and to get to know you and others there. Maybe I'll pick up an exclusive story/angle from chatting with others.

Please don't invite me to give up time with my family, or just myself, to hear your pitches all evening long. Your PR team probably told you it was a bad idea to do that - but who listens to them?

And you know what? Your pitch, that file sharing will boost music markets, is fake. Because you make your money anyway from enabling music sharing (living high on the bountiful riches from ad clicks...). Yet you are essentially saying to content creators/providers "give it away and you will end up selling more music and making more money."

You are not taking the risk of giving away content, but you are telling content owners they should. There is no leadership high ground to be had here.

Much has been said, rightly, about the stupidity of the music/movie industry in slapping down digital technologies that could aid them. But Mercora has only its self interest at stake in encouraging/enabling support for widespread song sharing.

Why don't you buy up a record label or two and give the content away as a demonstration of where your wallet meets your pitch?

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Interestingly, Perk, a musician Mercora shipped in from Los Angeles to perform two songs during the evening, said he admonished his friends for burning copies of his CDs for others. "How am I supposed to make money if you do that?" Despite long days performing, promoting and booking his own shows, (standalone musician) Perk said he makes most of his money selling tank tops for young women. And he has a generous patron, his wife, with a job.

Without music content, Mercora has a nice interface to nothing. Where is Mercora's value-add? Mercora's software enables Perk's music to be heard widely for free, while promising him pie-in-the-sky when he gets thousands of listeners...

I think I'd rather be a content creator/owner, like Perk, during this next phase of the internet, because content will be king this time around, while servers and software become commoditized.

(BTW, I bought the domain ContentWillBeKing.com a year ago. Why not? It was $8 on GoDaddy...own a piece of the English language online and a piece of the future for $8—priceless.)

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An excellent write up of the MGM-Grokster case and its implications at Eweek:

Preparing for the Grokster Watershed

Updated:

Mercora apologised for keeping me away from my son, and pointed out that it does pay for music, it is the same rate as a radio station pays to play music.