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