MGM Vs Grokster
By Maddy Willson
Arguably the most important copyright case in digital era
is a United States Supreme Court verdict in which the Court
collectively held that defendant P2P file sharing companies
Grokster and Streamcast could be sued for inducing copyright
infringement for marketing file sharing software.
The SCOTUS Justices were convinced by the media industry
and provided the industry with the copyright inducement standard.
There really wasn't even a variance between the 7th court
ruling on Aimster and the 9th that Streamcast's software was
legal under Sony Beta Max, but they didn't seem to understand
the architectural differences of one being a software product
(Morpheus) and the other being a central service (Aimster)
and granted cert.
After the ruling they fundamentally legislated what Senator
Orin Hatch had failed to accomplish with his much derided
and tabled inducement bill. There were many great technology
companies such as Intel and Verizon, and freedom of information
oriented entities like the ALA that provided amicus briefs
in support of the defendants.
The result is that the bright line test of Sony Beta Max
which Sony won after three trips to the Supreme Court has
been blurred. That test basically said that a staple article
of commerce had to have the potential of substantial non-infringing
use and if it did, then it was legal even if many uses could
be infringing (consider the computer itself for instance).
Now any company can be sued by a copyright holder if one email
from one employee appears to have induced anybody to infringe
copyright, years after the fact, making it a lingering tertiary
liability risk for the company.
If this law had existed in Sony's VCR era we likely would
not have the VCR or many consumer electronic products. That
bright line was critical to innovation. This is not a good
situation for Internet innovation or citizens who are also
being sued for sharing content with fellow citizens. The same
basic P2P networking approach that came out of file sharing
(Kazaa) went on to power Skype for instance which is obviously
an important innovation.
Computers are meant to save, copy, network and process files
so impeding that process is similar to arguing that computers
should be hobbled. In theory does the computer itself induce
infringement? Does the Internet itself induce us to be bad
actors with respect to copyright? How about our desktop printers
and our DVD burners?
If you have any complaints about this article send me a message
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Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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