Some time ago over on the main site I wrote about the MGM v Grokster case in the Supreme Court of the United States (or SCOTUS as the online law nerds like to call it). Well the decision’s in, and contrary to what some of the commentators have been saying, it’s a reaonable enough judgement, delivered by the moderate Justice David Souter. Essentially it leaves standing the Sony principle – that a manufacturer is not liable just because his product can be used to infringe copyright, while holding on the facts that Grokster and Dreamcast were guilty of “actual inducement” of users to trade files illegally. This is a step further than Sony, who always at least kept up the charade that Betamax was only intended for home video use.
There’s plenty of evidence that Grokster and Dreamcast on the other hand went to some trouble to induce people to use their products to share copyrighted music, so as I suggested in my earlier article, they weren’t whiter than white going into the case. This is what makes some of the protests I’ve been reading this afternoon seem more than a little disingenuous. Unless you have a problem with the whole principle of copyright (and many do) it’s hard to fault the judgement, except to point out that by giving neither the industry nor the Free Culture types what they wanted, it has a fudgy taste about it.
It remains to be seen how the judgement will affect online practice. Perhaps file sharing sites will simply put up a big banner telling us that “File Sharing is Killing Music…..and It’s Illegal!” while knowing full well that we’re all at it. The whole decision is available for download in pdf. format, but you may prefer to wait for a digested version which I’ll post when I’ve read the whole thing in more detail.