Hollywood studios and record companies on Friday asked the United States Supreme Court to overturn a controversial series of recent court decisions that have kept file-swapping software legal.
The decisions have been among the biggest setbacks for the entertainment industry in the past several years, as they have tried to quell the rampant exchange of copyrighted materials over peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa and Morpheus.
In a joint petition to the Supreme Court, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said that letting the lower court rulings stand would badly undermine the value of copyrighted work.
“This is one of the most important copyright cases ever to reach this court,” the groups said in papers filed with the court. “Resolution of the question presented here will largely determine the value, indeed the very significance, of copyright in the digital era.”
The ongoing case has helped define the limits of what is legal for software companies, as the entertainment companies have tried to hold peer-to-peer developers responsible for the widespread copyright infringement of people using their products.
Record labels had made this claim successfully against Napster, which ultimately shut down under the pressure of court-ordered network filters. But a Los Angeles federal judge said Grokster and StreamCast Networks, which distribute software allowing people to trade files without any further intervention by the companies, should not share the same fate.
“Defendants distribute and support software, the users of which can and do choose to employ it for both lawful and unlawful ends,” federal Judge Stephen Wilson wrote in his 2003 decision. “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.”
Wilson’s ruling was upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in August.
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