A federal appeals court has upheld a controversial court decision that said file-sharing software programs such as Grokster or Morpheus are legal.
Following the lead of a lower court decision last year, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Los Angeles said on Thursday that peer-to-peer software developers were not liable for any copyright infringement committed by people using their products, as long as they had no direct ability to stop the acts. (Download the decision.)
The ruling means that companies that write and distribute peer-to-peer software can’t be shut down because of the actions of their customers. But it doesn’t shield peer-to-peer users who download copyrighted files from lawsuits, such as those filed against thousands of individuals by the Recording Industry Association of America.
The long-awaited decision did not say that file-trading itself was legal, and lower courts in the United States have said that individual computer users are breaking the law when they trade copyrighted files without permission. But the ruling does lift the cloud of potential liability from defendants Grokster and StreamCast Networks, as well as from many of their rivals.
“The (record labels and movie studios) urge a re-examination of the law in the light of what they believe to be proper public policy,” the court wrote. “Doubtless, taking that step would satisfy the copyright owners’ immediate economic aims. However, it would also alter general copyright law in profound ways with unknown ultimate consequences outside the present context.”
The decision marks a substantial–if not entirely unexpected–setback for the big record labels and movie studios, which have tried hard to win legal rulings that would clamp down on anarchic peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa or eDonkey.
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