Slashdot Mirror
MGM v. Grokster Date Set
An anonymous reader writes "The Supreme Court has set March 29th as the date for oral arguments to begin in the Grokster trial. As we all know the final ruling will have ramifications on the tech world well beyond P2P. A decision is expected by end of July."
While the original Betamax case was over 20 years ago now, there are three current justices on the Supreme Court who presided over the original case.
O'Connor and Stevens voted in favor of Sony
and Rehnquist voted against.
Source
It will be interesting to see how this case turns out.
I've got an idea. We could rename p2p to something else. You know, kinda like how solicitors get around the no-call list. After all, they're not soliciting, their giving me "curtisy calls".
Why don't we sue knife, gun, and tobacco manufacturers as well? Oh wait...
All your Sybase are belong to us.
I'm not certain if it's volume or percentage. I'm not the one who came up with that saying. However, as a general rule of thumb the Supreme Court won't even hear an appeal unless there is a circuit split on the issue (or they think it's just downright wrong, but that happens less often). What I suspect is the case is that the 9th circuit is the most common one to split from other circuits, and is the one most often found to be in the wrong in those situations.
But I'm certainly no scholar of 9th Circuit history. And yes, I'd rather be wrong 17 times out of 100 than 4 out of 10. In fact, I'd rather be wrong 50 times out of 100 than 4 out of 10. Wrong half the time out of 100 means you are often wrong, but you are a hard worker. Wrong 40% of the time out of 10 cases heard means you are not only wrong pretty frequently, but you are lazy, and I hate laziness and dishonesty more than any other human traits.
The **AA are really suing because of copy infringement etc.
I think they are mostly pissed off that Grokster (and Napster back in the day) are making money off the P2P software.
The **AA must be so steamed that not only does Grokster make money off of ad sales, but they have the nerve to sell a 'pro' version.
Notice how they haven't gone after Justin Frankell for writing Waste (or Gnutella for that matter) and they've ignored Bram Cohen even though Bittorrent takes up a significant portion of internet bandwidth nowadays.
I'd love to see them sue every damn software company that writes FTP progs. They'll probably have to go after Microsoft too, because windows has a native (though shitty) ability to serve files.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
This is, after all, the USA. After what happened in November, I have given up all hope of ever seeing developments in this country that would not appall any reasonable person. The ship is sinking, people.
to distribute large files, specifically OS distributions. even if 99% of its use is movies or whatever, that doesnt change the fact that nothing in its design shows any illegal motovation.
I don't know, but I have never seen anyone do it. I know that some people will chime in and say they use it at school or at work or they are a musician themselves, but these are in the vast minority.
heres a clue: not everyone on the internet is downloading movies. some of us have legitmate reasons.
heres a chime in, every use of bittorrent i have done has been for os distribution, and i know several others who have done the same. when fedora came out, almost all of us (LUG in the valley in Los Angeles) used bittorrent to get it.
it really is a good method. even commercial entities are using it.
heres hoping some os distribution makes a p2p update protocol. maybe one like ubuntu or gentoo...