Aehso’s Output

Case to watch: MGM vs Grokster.

Yesterday, the MGM vs Grokster case kicked off in Washington - an internesting summary is available at Timothy K. Armstrong’s blog (Tim is a Harvard law student who attended the session). They’re calling this the biggest copyright ruling since the BetaMax Case (1984) that ruled that yes it was legal for people to sell equipment that is capable of recording copyrighted material (but it is still illegal for users to mis-use that equipment)

This is yet another of those bell-weather cases between multinational copyright holders and small independent distribution mechanisms. Except, err, in this case, Grokster didn’t actually distribute anything - they just wrote the P2P software that others used to distribute between themselves in a decentralized way, as opposed to the old Napster system where Napster servers were “in the loop”. The RIAA seem to be clutching every straw they can grasp at this stage - one of these days, they will have to stand up and admit the world has changed and change their business models (artist renumeration, licensing) to reflect this.

One interesting observation from Tim highlights how absurd the MGM case really is:

At least some of the Justices, Scalia in particular, seemed troubled by how an inventor would know, at the time of inventing, how its invention might be marketed in the future. How, some of the Justices asked MGM, could the inventors of the iPod (or the VCR, or the photocopier, or even the printing press) know whether they could go ahead with developing their invention? It surely would not be difficult for them to imagine that somebody might hit upon the idea of marketing their device as a tool for infringement.

Let’s hope the U.S. Supreme Court justices are fully informed and hand down a just ruling on this one. I hope you’re not in a rush though - it’ll be three months before they hand down their ruling!

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