Online file swapping of movies and music won’t be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. For now.
The justices chose October 12 to sidestep the question as to whether Internet service providers can be forced to identify subscribers swapping movies and music over peer-to-peer networks like KaZaA, Grokster, Morpheus, eDonkey, and others.
The Recording Industry Association of America had hoped the Supremes would get into the act now, saying the law is needed to stop what they consider the heavy bleeding of over 2.6 billion music files downloaded illegally per month.
Verizon Communications is one of two ISPs in litigation with the RIAA and has maintained that the music industry has not been deterred in going after actual or alleged infringers. Verizon attorney John Thorne cautioned the Supreme Court that lower courts could end up being smothered with tens of thousands of disputed proceedings if it sides with the RIAA or the Motion Picture Association of America on the issue.
A federal appeals court ruled 10 months earlier that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act – written and enacted before P2P became widespread in cyberspace – could not be used to get information about people who swap copyrighted works. An RIAA attorney said copyright holders can’t fight back without knowing who the infringers are.
"That is crippling the private copyright enforcement that Congress envisioned as a bulwark against Internet lawlessness, and allowing Internet piracy to metastasize," said Washington-based RIAA attorney Donald Verrilli.
The appeals court ruled it’s Congress’s job and not that of the courts to expand the DMCA to cover P2P networks.
This doesn’t mean the Supreme Court will avoid the question for very long—the Bush Administration generally supports the music and movie industries’ position on using the DMCA to get information about Netizens swapping files, even if the White House has urged the Supremes to wait before settling the issue.
Last week, the movie and music industries filed a Supreme Court appeal looking to overturn another critical P2P ruling by a federal appeals court – the ruling that upheld a lower court finding that Grokster and Morpheus could not be held liable for infringement committed by their users, since the networks programs can be used for purposes other than swapping music and movies.
