Petition asks high court to hear case on file sharing
by Byron Kho
The Daily Pennsylvanian
October 13, 2004
A consortium of movie and record companies joined forces on Friday to request that the U.S. Supreme Court take another look at peer-to-peer file-sharing programs.
The two groups delivered a petition to the Court requesting that it address the recent controversial lower-court ruling that says file-sharing "P-to-P" programs are not liable for copyright infringements committed by their users.
The petition was jointly filed by the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, against a decision that had absolved both StreamCast Networks, Inc. and Grokster -- file-sharing services popular both across the country and at Penn -- of blame for user actions.
In the original ruling last year, Los Angeles federal judge Stephen Wilson maintained that products of these networks can be used for legitimate purposes and, as such, "are not significantly different from companies that sell home video recorders or copy machines, both of which can be and are used to infringe copyrights." It was subsequently upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals last August.
"We think the Ninth Circuit's reading of current copyright law in this case [was] essentially correct," said Mike Godwin, legal director of Public Knowledge, an advocacy group for intellectual property rights.
In the petition papers filed with the Supreme Court, the RIAA and MPAA disputed the appeals court decision, claiming that "Grokster and StreamCast business models depend on copyright infringement."
They further assert that the Court should address the issue because "resolution of the question presented here will largely determine the value, indeed the very significance, of copyright in the digital era."
The petition also held that the appeals court decision conflicts with the findings in a similar case involving Aimster, another file-sharing program. In the Seventh Circuit Court decision, Aimster was ordered to shut down because the ruling said that Aimster had "provided no evidence whatsoever" that it wasn't doing anything other than music piracy.
But even as the consortium stressed the importance of the piracy issue, national advocacy groups and popular online message boards were coming out in support of the appeals court decision and against the petition.
"There is no reason the Supreme Court should review the Grokster decision," said Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge.
She compared it to the Betamax case of 1984, in which the Supreme Court had ruled that the normal usage of a VCR was not technically a copyright infringement.
The Betamax case "led to the largest and most profitable period of technological innovation in this country's history. Consumers, industry and our country have all benefited as a result."
The Grokster decision was another blow to the entertainment industry, which has attempted to stop widespread file-sharing by litigating file-swapping companies, Internet service providers and individuals across the nation. Recently, it has appealed to Congress for tighter anti-piracy laws.
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