June 27, 2005
Grokster Fallout ::
supreme court, tech, legal — No Tags
11:58 am
PDF of the Grokster opinion, hosted on this site.
OK, so I haven’t scrutinized the opinion yet, but it looks like the Supreme Court’s Grokster decision is bad news for filesharing. But one point of optimism is in order: the Court declined to overrule Sony/Betamax. In the opinion’s main reference to that case, the Court only noted that the Ninth Circuit’s interpretation of the theory of secondary liability. Justice Souter notes only that the Ninth Circuit was mistaken in its interpretation, because it
[converted] the case from one about liability resting on imputed intent to one about liability on any theory. Because Sony did not displace other theories of secondary liability, and because we find below that it was error to grant summary judgment to the companies on MGM’s inducement claim, we do not revisit Sony further, as MGM requests, to add a more quantified description of the point of balance between protection and commerce when liability rests solely on distribution with knowledge that unlawful use will occur. It is enough to note that the Ninth Circuit’s judgment rested on an erroneous understanding of Sony and to leave further consideration of the Sony rule for a day when that may be required.
Phew!
I’m sure in the coming days there were be heavy discussion in the tech law community on the Grokster case. And for those of us who are concerned with overly-expansive copyright law, I think we’ll be discussing what, exactly, this opinion didn’t say.
