On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in MGM v. Grokster. The Grokster case, for those who haven’t been following it, concerns the liability of distributors of P2P software. As we all know, there are legitimate uses for P2P software (think BitTorrent and distributing Linux ISOs, which are legally free and clear for distribution) and infringing uses (distributing MP3s of Dark Side of the Moon on a P2P network). The question is, whether a distributor should be held liable for infringing uses when there are substantial non-infringing uses as well.
The case is a test of the famous (or infamous, if you happen to be on the recording industry’s side of the fence) Betamax standard. (See the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Betamax Case page for an excellent summary of Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios.)
The ramifications of this case are huge: A loss for the Grokster could mean disaster for P2P filesharing systems across the board, as well as other technologies. If Grokster is liable for infringing uses, would the ProFTPD Team be liable when someone grabs a copy of Star Wars from a server running ProFTPD? Would Microsoft be liable when someone uses IE to download MP3s from websites? Since almost any file transfer software could be abused to infringe on copyrights, where would the line be drawn? A loss for Grokster could have a serious chilling effect for all sorts of software.
Read the Complete Story @ Zdnet
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