NYT: (Supreme Court) to Hear Case on Sharing of Music Files

[DeepModem Mom]

Justices to Hear Case on Sharing of Music Files
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
Published: December 11, 2004


WASHINGTON, Dec. 10 - The Supreme Court, accepting urgent pleas from the recording and film industries, agreed on Friday to decide whether the online services that enable copyrighted songs and movies to be shared freely over the Internet can be held liable themselves for aiding copyright infringement.

For the entertainment industry and for everyday consumers, the case is likely to produce the most important copyright decision since the Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that the makers of the videocassette recorder were not liable for violating the copyrights of movies that owners of the devices recorded at home.

The earlier decision, Sony Corporation of America v. Universal City Studios, ushered in one technological revolution. The new case, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios v. Grokster Ltd., No. 04-480, comes as another is already well under way. More than 85 million copyrighted songs and a smaller but rapidly growing number of movies are downloaded from the Internet every day by people using file-sharing services.

A lawsuit filed by the entertainment industry in 2000 eventually put the earliest file-sharing network, Napster, out of business. The industry then brought suits against individuals who shared copyrighted material over the Internet, but that proved inefficient. The defendants in the case the justices accepted today are two of the newer services, Grokster and StreamCast Networks, which offers peer-to-peer software called Morpheus....


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/11/technology/11copyright.html

[UL_Approved]

1. I know how this will go, but...

...we can't give up on the technology because it gets outlawed. It won't be surprising if ALL software is subject to some corporate-controlled criteria in the next 4 years.

[Khephra]

2. The laws will never keep up with the techies and hackers

The studios are going after P2P programs that are at least two generations old now. Most people have moved onto Bittorrents and the next step after Bittorrents is about to become a reality--and then this lawsuit will be three generations behind the tech curve. Even if the court rules in the studio's favor, they won't be able to go after Bittorrents as they aren't file sharing networks in the same sense as those above.