Supreme Court Rules Against Grokster

by Glen Shapiro, LawAndTax-News.com, New York

29 June 2005

Ruling on Monday, the US Supreme Court judged that peer-to-peer downloading services Grokster and StreamCast can be held liable for copyright infringement activity undertaken by their users.

In a petition filed late last year, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) asked the Supreme Court to re-examine an appeals court ruling which stated that peer-to-peer file sharing networks such as Grokster, Kazaa and Morpheus could not be held legally responsible for the copyright-infringing activities of their customers.

Supporting a ruling delivered by a lower court, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Los Angeles in August 2004 announced that the file-sharing firms cannot be held responsible for the use to which their services are put, so long as they are not directly able to stop the copyright infringing acts in question.

However, writing on behalf of the majority this week, Justice David Souter announced that:

"We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement."

He went on to add:

"The record is replete with evidence that from the moment Grokster and StreamCast began to distribute their free software...each one clearly voiced the objective that recipients use it to download copyrighted works and each took active steps to encourage infringement."

The Supreme Court did not, however, overturn the 1984 Sony Betamax decision upon which the P2P services based their defence.

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