Court to Hear Landmark P2P Case

CrystalFalcon writes "Wired News reports that a federal appeals court is poised to hear arguments in a landmark case involving Grokster and Morpheus that could decide the future of peer-to-peer services, and may affect whether technology companies can be held liable for their customers' behavior." The appeal against last April's Grokster/Morpheus court win will take a while to shake out, though: "At Tuesday's hearing, each side will have 30 minutes to present its arguments and answer questions from the three judges. The judges will likely take several months to issue an opinion on the matter."

Comments

Betamax

[mmca]

As quoted in the article:

In the landmark Sony Betamax case in 1984, the Supreme Court ruled that Sony was not liable for contributory copyright infringement for selling VCRs that allowed consumers to tape content from their televisions.

What was presented that makes this case different? Just because its on the internet? There seems to be this overwheleming need to make laws to cover things that already exisit just because it is now online. We have too many laws at it is.

-M

Re:OT: Why so long?

[alen]

They have other cases to decide. They also need to research the law on this before issuing a decision. Each side will present a brief with many quotes of prior case law. The judges will need to research the briefs before issuing a decision. The oral arguments are just a summation of the briefs that are submitted. Many parties will also submit friend of the court briefs.

Re:How is that figured?

[Artifakt]

If you look at a reasonable spread, like 10 years, or even just the time the current set of judges on the 9th district have all sat together, or the time since GWB took office, the 9th is far from first place on % overturned, and not even in 1st place on total numbers.
You can take an odd sample, i.e. for the three weeks in early april 2001, and the 9th may be in first place for that time. That's where this claim started, when some conservative talk-radio hosts mentioned that for the last few weeks, the 9th was being overturned a lot, and it's become exaggerated repeatedly since then, chiefly by other conservatives. It's not even clear that the original claim was either right or researched at all.