Hoping the high court will put a dent in online music swapping, the recording industry is filing briefs January 24 to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has a March 29 hearing scheduled on the contentious issue of whether peer-to-peer networks should be held liable directly for what their users do.
The Supreme Court agreed in December to hear the appeal of two lower court rulings holding that Grokster and Morpheus – which do not store music on their own central servers – were not directly responsible for copyright-infringing activity of its users.
Recording Industry Association of America chief executive Mitch Bainwol said in a statement that a Supreme Court ruling “could help us move to a world when file-sharing goes legitimate.”
The Justice Department made what the RIAA might hope is a move in that direction last week. They announced two men said to be key figures in a file-swapping group known as the Underground Network pleaded guilty to copyright infringement, and face up to five years behind bars and up to $250,000 in fines each at their late April sentencing.
A reported 200 million songs online legally last year – mostly through Apple’s iTunes Music Store, which has had 230 million downloads since its April 2003 premiere – while a reported 13 billion such files changed hands on the P2P networks, according to Internet analysts BigChampagne.
Other analysts, including Inside Digital Media, think the popularity of Apple’s iPod spurred compact disc sales, which rose for the first time in four years in 2004, even if only 2.3 percent in the United States.
