Peer to Peer: The Grokster Case
This term the Supreme Court will hear arguements in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd.
Procedurally, this is an appeal from a 9th Circuit opinion upholding a CA district court’s grant of summary judgment for the defendants, Grokster and Kazaa.
The question in the Cert Petition is whether the 9th circuit misapplied the principles of secondary liability when it found that Grokster and the other defendants weren’t liable for the infringement of their users.
Specifically, the question is of the Ninth Circuit’s application of the Sony Doctrine. The Sony doctrine comes from a case in which the content industry sued Sony for their Betamax video recorder. The Supreme Court ruled that Sony was not secondarily liable for the infringement of VCR owners, and any such technology could not be liable if it was “capable of substantial non-infringing use.”
For the Ninth Circuit, being capable of substantial non-infringing use doesn’t completely save you. If you still have knowledge of specific infringement — such as Napster did when someone searched their servers — and you fail to act on that information, you are therefore liable for that infringement.
Thus the Grokster/Kazaa technology becomes important. Napster kept central servers of all the files shared, Grokster/Kazaa don’t know what is being shared in their network, because searching for files is decentralized among the participants.
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Although I haven’t been following the case at all, from what you say here it appears this could be a huge case. If the Court finds against Grokster would that potentially make all file sharing software/technology illegal? How far could this go?
Comment by ambimb — 1/15/2005 @ 7:10 pm
There’s lots of things going on. For example, the 9th circuit, starting in Napster, has kind of messed up the Sony doctrine with weird knowledge requirements — which got played out in Grokster.
I didn’t even touch the Aimster decision, in which Posner found Aimster to be liable for infringement. The problem is that Posner’s opinion included a lot of dicta which changed the Sony doctrine into a balancing test (infringing vs. non-infringing) and also didn’t take the technology before it as a given — it would treat it like a products liability. So that developers might be liable for the acts of their users and would even have to litigate over design tradeoffs of including copyright protection. Ugh.
Suffice it to say that everyone — software, ISP’s, consumer electronics, are freaked out by what could happen. And its not just that the court could do something drastic. Its that they could do something that will have unintended consequences.
Comment by luminous — 1/15/2005 @ 11:14 pm