Supreme Court Split In Grokster Case

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

31 March 2005

According to reports in the US legal media, the Supreme Court was divided this week over the liability that should be assumed by peer-to-peer downloading services such as Grokster for the copyright infringement committed by their customers.

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 are not liable 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.

As the matter was discussed on Tuesday, justices reportedly expressed concern over the lack of factual information regarding the actual amount of copyright infringement taking place.

The Legal Times revealed that Justice Antonin Scalia likened the creation of Grokster to the invention of the Xerox photocopying machine, which likely received a great deal of its initial cash flow from copyright infringing customers.

However, other justices appeared to feel that far from representing "startup capital" for the creation of a substantially non-infringing business base, illegal music and film downloads represent the vast majority of peer-to-peer sites' business.

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