Law Nerdity - MGM v. Grokster
Monday, February 7th, 2005MGM v. Grokster, which determines if the makers of P2P file sharing programs will be held liable for copyright infringement that occurs on their networks, will be argued before the Supreme Court on March 29. Needless to say, this is something I’m really interested in. The case doesn’t seem too terribly complicated, so I’m hoping this is something I can work my way through without making an ass out of myself. I mean, I was gonna read all this stuff anyways, so I might as well blog about it too.
This probably won’t be interesting to any of you, but if I happen to be wrong, feel free to join in the nerdity!
Since I’m not even a law student yet, I won’t try to say anything insightful about the case. For now, I’ll just link and summarize (hopefully without too many glaring mistakes).
Basically, a bunch of motion picture studios and record companies (among others) sued Grokster (and Streamcast, but we’ll just ignore them), saying Grokster was liable for the copyright infringement of its users. The district court found for Grokster and the Ninth Circuit affirmed (those crazy west-coasters!), finding that because the file sharing software has substantial non-infringing uses, it falls under the control of the Sony-Betamax case and Grokster is not liable. The Supreme Court granted certiorari, and here we are.
(links below)