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wired.com wrote:When Grokster and MGM Studios square off Tuesday in front of the Supreme Court, the lawyers will argue copyright law. But the court's decision will affect how people use entertainment and share information.
The highly anticipated case, MGM Studios v. Grokster, pits all the major movie studios and record labels against Grokster and StreamCast Networks, two operators of file-sharing services.
The entertainment companies petitioned the Supreme Court to take the case after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in August that file-sharing companies are not liable for their users' copyright infringement. The decision upheld a lower-court ruling from April 2003.
The appeals court based its ruling on the 1984 Supreme Court Sony Betamax case. In that case, the court ruled Sony's videotape recorder was a legal device because it was "capable of substantial non-infringing uses," even though it could be used to violate copyrights. The case is credited with leading to a lucrative home-video and DVD market for the entertainment companies. The decision also provided innovators with a benchmark to support the development of new products.
A number of emerging-technology companies are among the Grokster supporters who have filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case, concerned that a ruling for the entertainment companies could stifle innovation and harm their businesses.
"The large content players ... are trying to shift the enforcement burden to the tools manufacturers," said Scott Rafer, CEO of Feedster, a blog search engine. "That directly impacts my business."
Rafer said Feedster already removes copyright material from its site when it receives Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices from copyright holders.
"If we have to look (at) every piece of inbound stuff that comes in for copyright materials, then most of the internet tools that we use every day would be illegal," Rafer said.
"All these internet technologies share this common mass-copying capability: e-mail, web servers, web browsers, basic hard drives," said Jason Schultz, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represents StreamCast Networks. "There's no principal distinction between (P2P) and other internet technologies in the way it's designed.
"I think the court will find it very, very difficult -- if not impossible -- to draw any distinctions between the programs in front of them in this case and other internet communication programs," he said.
Also signing on to the emerging technologies' amicus brief are companies like Kaleidescape, which markets a product that permits people to store personal DVDs on a secure home server and access them from any room in the house. And Slim Devices, maker of the Squeezebox that people can use to stream music from a home computer to a stereo, has signed on.