Whether the makers of peer-to-peer file-sharing networks will be held directly responsible for infringement activity on the part of their users will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court as scheduled beginning March 29.
MGM v. Grokster, Stream Cast pits Grokster and Morpheus (Stream Cast is Morpheus’s parent) against the movie industry, a case in which a federal judge ruled the two P2P networks could not be held responsible because they don’t store movie or music files directly. That ruling was upheld by a federal appeals court, and the plaintiffs appealed to the high court.
And every P2P network will be watching the case as closely as the movie and music industries will, even if they think the programs will remain online while the companies that make them will die. "If the Supreme Court says it is illegal to produce this software,” LimeWire chief Mark Gorton told reporters, “LimeWire the company will cease to exist. But LimeWire the software will continue to be on the Net no matter what we do in this business."
Some observers think the Supreme Court could, in theory, use the case to redefine copyright reach in a high-tech era in which media downloading and digital entertainment products like portable player iPod and digital recording system TiVo have become phenomenally popular.
Others think that, if the high court rules in favor of Grokster and Morpheus as the lower courts did, the music and movie industries are liable to ramp up their litigation efforts against individual file swappers. And still others think there’s a permanent war on between copyright owners and technology.
"We are guerrillas fighting the despotic regime," said Alan Morris, the executive vice president of Sharman Networks, whose popular KaZaA P2P program is fighting its own battle against the Australian music industry. "They have some quite heavy guns, but we can see where they are firing from.”
But the music and movie industries have also taken steps to try coming to terms in their own way with Internet downloading. Two major music players, Universal and Sony, have deals with Snocap to provide music. The irony: Snocap is the brainchild of Shawn Fanning, whose Napster was the granddaddy of P2P in the first place, until litigation killed the original company, now resurrected as a pay-to-play online music store.