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U.S. Supreme Court Justices Offer Mixed Views During Arguments in Landmark 'Grokster' Case
WASHINGTON, DC ' The controversy over whether developers and distributors of peer-to-peer file-sharing software should be found liable for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement has been described as the most important copyright case for the entertainment industry in two decades ' or as an issue that Congress ultimately will decide. (That the underlying unlicensed downloading and uploading of entertainment content by consumers is direct infringement has already been made clear by courts.) To this observer in the court's press section, questioning by the U.S. Supreme Court justices during the recent oral arguments in what is known as the Grokster case, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. (MGM) v. Grokster Ltd., 04-480, demonstrated no clear consensus among the justices.
Much of the discussion at the U.S. Supreme Court revolved around how much of a guide the court's previous ruling in Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984) should be. In that case, the court decided that sales of videotape recorders didn't constitute contributory copyright infringement despite the fact that manufacturers knew the recorders were used for some infringing purposes. On the court today are just three of the justices who voted in the Sony case: Associate Justice John Paul Stevens, the author of the 5-4 Sony majority decision, Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, a centrist and key court swing vote who sided with Stevens in Sony, and Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, a dissenter in the Sony case.
Focusing much of the time on the Sony “substantial non-infringing use” defense relied on by the district court in Grokster, several Supreme Court justices nevertheless considered the validity of the District Court's grant of summary judgment to the Grokster defendants, which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld. These justices pondered whether a trial should be held on an issue left open by the district court: Whether defendants Grokster and StreamCast Networks could be held liable for infringement by actively inducing software users to download copyrighted content.
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