The
United States Supreme Court said it will hear oral arguments in an ongoing dispute over the legality of filesharing. The entertainment industry has been using every legal weapon at its disposal to attempt to squash filesharing. They argue that
P2P networks are mostly used for illegal activities on a massive scale and that means that they should not only be ruled illegal but the developers and owners of such networks should be liable for the
copyright infringement that took place on the network. On the P2P side, the argument is straight forward. While P2P networks do allow activity such as copyright infringement to take place, they do not promote it and P2P networks have been proven to have many legitimate uses.
That aspect of the ongoing dispute resembles the
Sony Betamax ruling which ruled that Sony was not liable for any illegal activity a customer used their equipment for, and the equipment was legal because it had many legitimate uses also. The case the Supreme Court will hear began with the
Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) and the
Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filing a lawsuit against the
Grokster and
Morpheus Networks, which they lost in lower courts. The Supreme Court will hear the case on
March 29th.
Source:
Betanews
Written by: James Delahunty @ 22 Jan 2005 17:57
