The entertainment industry urged the U.S. Supreme Court Monday afternoon not to give the companies developing peer-to-peer (P2P) music file swapping software a “perpetual free pass” to engage in “mind-boggling” copyright infringement.
In a 67-page brief filed in advance of the March 29 Supreme Court oral arguments in MGM vs. Grokster, attorneys for the music and movie studios claim Grokster exploits “this massive infringement for profit, and petitioners are suffering extreme harms as a consequence.”
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 such as Grokster, Morpheus and Kazaa are not liable for the infringement of their users.
The Supreme Court in December agreed to hear the case that challenges the court’s landmark 1984 Sony Betamax decision. In the two lower court decisions, judges exonerated Grokster and its parent company, StreamCast, of secondary copyright liability based on the Betamax decision.
The judges used the Betamax standard established by the Supreme Court, which states that the use of new technology to infringe copyrights did not justify an outright ban on that technology as long as the technology had other, legal uses.
Read the complete story @ internetnews.com
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