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High Court Agrees to Hear File-Sharing Dispute
stkpogo pastes: "The Supreme Court agreed Friday to consider whether two Internet file-sharing services may be held responsible for their customers' online swapping of copyrighted songs and movies. Justices will review a lower ruling in favor of Grokster Ltd. and StreamCast Networks Inc., which came as a blow to recording companies and movie studios seeking to stop the illegal distribution of their works." Grokster won in the lower courts, but the studios are appealing. This case, when finally decided, will be equivalent to the Betamax case 20 years ago which ensured that VCRs were legal.
I live in the home of the free...
This was decided a long time ago in Canada.
To summarize (and over-simplify) It's no different then a Library having a photocopier in a room full of copyrighted books. What people use it for is up to them.
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
Wouldn't change anything. Democrats are just as much in the pockets of big business, moreso perhaps in the entertainment and "intellectual property" business.
Whenever I have gtk-gnutella running, you'll find them on the gnutella network. They're mine to share, I'm not violating anyone's copyright.
Sometime soon I'm going to share lossless WAVs over bittorrent. I have to fix a problem with one of the tracks first.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
No, you're wrong.
In Sony the claim was whether Sony was liable for infringing uses of its products via a contributory infringement theory. It was a civil case, brought by Universal Studios.
If they had been found liable on the basis of how their products could be used, then of course, they'd continue to be liable in the future unless they took the relevant products off the market, or redesigned them so as to avoid future problems, so in effect their liability could've been considered a ban on the technology, but it really would've been as to the liability of the manufacturers and distributors of it.
Grokster is ALSO a civil suit, and is generally pretty similar.
If the suit were criminal, first the question would be of guilt, not liability. Second, it would be brought by the United States, not a private party.
You pretty clearly haven't read Sony, and don't really grasp the difference between criminal and civil litigation. You might want to do some work before posting on this subject again.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson
13 Aug. 1813Writings 13:333--34
It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." --Marvin the Martian
This is the same type of reasonaing that the Bell System used to claim millions in losses in the 911 hacker case. The company used a complicated formula to compute losses on a document that they sold copies of for $14. The court's didn't buy it in the 80's and should buy it now...
In case someone saw "911" in there and thought this had to do with terrorists, the parent poster is referring to the Craig Neidorf case. It actually happened in the early 90s. At the time, Neidorf published an online magazine called Phrack. In one issue, he published a document which described some really boring aspects of Enhanced 911. The company which produced the document included incredible things to up the price of the document. Salaries of employees, entire computer systems, hospital bills for the birth of employees, etc. The total came to somewhere around $80,000.
Thankfully, Neidorf won. Of course, he had a $100,000 bill for lawyer fees at the end of it. Justice is expensive.
As a Canadian, I 'pay' an ammount to the record industry when I buy CDR's. What if you download 1000's of MP3's and you don't own a cd recorder? If that were the case, than you didn't pay per CDR, so you have not compinsated the canadian record industry for your downloading. The supreme court of Canada says that downloading a copyrighted work is like photocopying a page from a book, however, millions of people didn't photocopy one page from the book. Downloading a song is like downloading the whole book (as far as copyright covering ONE book, and covering ONE song). It is illegal. I download songs, but I inherit the risk with downloading them. That's my choice. I accept the risk involved. Though, I am Canadian, and I buy CDR's, so I've compinsated the record companies (though not anywhere near the ammount considered adequate by the industry).