The peer-to-peer file swap community and the networks which facilitate them are due to gain a hugely significant ally: America's five major library associations were expected to join an amicus curae brief to a federal appeals court September 26, supporting Streamcast Networks and Grokster against record labels and film studios.
The American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries, the American Association of Law Libraries, the Medical Library Association and the Special Libraries Association will sign onto the brief, written by the American Civil Liberties Union in what published reports describe as one of the ACLU's first moves toward involvement in copyright law.
The filing will ask the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold an April ruling by a federal judge that threw out most of the music and film industry's claims against Streamcast and Grokster.
The amicus curae will stress that the library groups won't support "wrongful sharing of copyrighted materials," as ALA executive director Keith Michael Fiels said in an internal e-mail obtained by CNET.com. "Instead," Fiels wrote, "we believe the Supreme Court ruled correctly in the Sony/Betamax case. The court in that case created fair and practical rules which, if overturned, would as a practical matter give the entertainment industry a veto power over the development of innovative products and services."
That refers to a 1984 high court ruling which held that Sony couldn't be held liable for copyright infringement because the company itself wasn't directly involved in any infringement activity, such as Betamax owners using their videocassette recorders not just to record television programs or televised films but to make multiple copies of those programs or films to sell or distribute otherwise. The Betamax VCR may have been rendered obsolete (by VHS), but the ruling endured.
The ACLU, CNET.com said, believes P2P networks are "speech promoting technologies that have many noninfringing uses. If the (Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America) succeed in shutting down peer-to-peer networks or making them more centralized," CNET cited the ACLU as saying, "the precedent could create undesirable choke points that could be used to monitor Internet users
