On the same date (March 1) the briefs were due to the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of MGM, et.al. v. Grokster, StreamCast, StreamCast Networks has made those briefs available for public reading and downloads on its Morpheus peer-to-peer network.
“We believe that the people should have access to all of the relevant documents and Court filings in connection with this seminal case, and they should be able to easily, quickly and inexpensively find, download and read them at their convenience,” said StreamCast chief executive Michael Weiss, announcing the briefs' availability.
Adam Eisgrau, executive director of peer-to-peer trade association P2P United, said StreamCast making the briefs available for download proves the case for digital democracy.
“StreamCast’s actions today clearly demonstrate why we’ve seen time and time again -- at the grassroots and corporate levels alike -- that America wants and needs to digitize our democracy just as we needed and wanted it to take to the air when broadcasting was a glimmer in inventors’ eyes,” Eisgrau said in his own statement.
The briefs defending Grokster and Morpheus, and supporting lower and appellate court rulings that the two P2P networks are not liable for infringement activity by their users, include briefs from groups from venture capitalists and consumer electronics companies to legal scholars, consumer groups, tech researchers, and even some representatives of popular musicians like rock legend Steve Winwood and rap legend Chuck D.
“By making these documents available through the Morpheus application," Weiss said, "users are empowered to search for and download these items without being tethered to slow-loading and clunky Web pages, or difficult to search FTP sites.
“Certainly, if this is not an example of a 'substantial non-infringing use' of technology being applied for a very important objective – making the vast amount of information outside of copyright and in the 'public domain' available to anyone with access to a computer anywhere in the world at any time without choking the internet -- then I don’t know what is,”
Oral arguments before the Supreme Court begin March 29.
StreamCast vice president and general counsel Matthrw Neco said another reason to make all the briefs available was to let people make up their own minds about the briefs' arguments without the filtering of news organizations.
“Our judicial system and courts were intended by the founding fathers generally to be transparent rather than shrouded in mystery," Neco said, "but, all too often, citizens do not know what is going on in the Courts, and rely instead on filtered or sensationalized news reports and rumors. (Our) dissemination of the filings in this case will allow people everywhere to read and judge for themselves.”
Eisgrau said powerful interests like the music and film industries have been short sighted in massing their forces repeatedly to try getting the technological genie back into the bottle, "fearing that their strangleholds on the market would be forever broken by ‘disruptive’ innovation, and powerful forces in Hollywood have massed yet again.
"As the briefs StreamCast is helping to make available around the world today make plain," he continued, "it’s no exaggeration to say that the fate of unfettered access to information and the freedom to innovate, both vital pillars of our democratic society, are the real issues before the Court in this historic case.”
A federal judge in California held almost two years ago that Morpheus was legal because it included no servers to store copyrighted material on its own and could not be held explicitly liable for infringement by the network's users. A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower court ruling last summer, and the Supreme Court agreed in December to hear an appeal of that ruling.
