James Delahunty
25 Jan 2005 21:33
In a 67-page brief filed in advance of the March 29 Supreme Court oral arguments in MGM vs. Grokster, the entertainment industry is urging the U.S. Supreme Court not to give companies developing peer-to-peer (P2P) music file swapping software a perpetual free pass to engage in mind-boggling copyright infringement. Attorneys for the movie and music studios are claiming that Grokster and StreamCast do not use P2P technology for legitimate purposes. "Although the technology can be used for lawful exchanges of digital files, that is not how Grokster and StreamCast use it," the entertainment industry's brief states. "They run businesses that abuse the technology. At least 90 percent of the material on their services is infringing, and that infringement occurs millions of times each day".
"The services are breeding grounds for copyright infringement of unprecedented magnitude -- infringement that would not occur if Grokster and StreamCast did not make it possible," the brief continues. The U.S. Solicitor General, the Progress and Freedom Foundation (PFF), the Business Software Alliance and the Christian Coalition of America supported the music and movie industries by filing friends of the court briefs. Hollywood representatives are trying to stress that the case does not put the P2P technology against the entertainment industry. "These people are not engaging in technological innovation," Dan Glickman, president and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, stated.
Hollywood wants the high court to reverse a district court ruling and a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco decision that say file-swapping companies are not liable for the infringement of their users. Judge Stephen Wilson ruled against MGM in a District Court saying, "Grokster and StreamCast are not significantly different from companies that sell home video recorders or copy machines, both of which can be and are, used to infringe copyrights,". After Hollywood appealed the decision they got the same result from the Ninth Circuit court of Appeals. "The technology has numerous other uses, significantly reducing the distribution costs of public domain and permissively shared art and speech, as well as reducing the centralized control of that distribution," Judge Sidney R. Thomas wrote in his opinion.
Source:
InternetNews.com