In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court decided against the file sharing application in MGM v. Grokster. What follows is the rant that I promised yesterday, if this happened.

For those of you who aren’t up to speed on this one, I’ll try to summarize. Grokster is a software program that allows consumers to share files across the internet. It is “peer-to-peer” software, which means that users connect directly to other users in order to search for and exchange files. File information is never sent to a central Grokster server, and Grokster has no knowledge or control over the files that consumers exchange using their software.

According to MGM, and not really denied by Grokster, a large majority of the files that are exchanged using the software are copyrighted music and movies. Grokster stressed the benefits of peer-to-peer technology over the more common ways of exchanging files, which depend on a central server. They claimed that their technology has considerable uses other than to facilitate the exchange of copyrighted material.

I have read through the Opinion of the Court, and it appears that Grokster didn’t do a whole lot to help themselves. It is obvious that they did little to discourage the exchange of copyrighted material, and there is considerable evidence that they used the availability of free copyrighted material as a selling point of their software to help attract more users, which translated into more advertising dollars.

So, the Supreme Court decided that Grokster went too far. Their decision claims that this is not an indictment against all types of file sharing software. It is not a decision against any company or application that facilitates the sharing of copyrighted material. It is just Grokster. Clearly, they went too far.

Basically, today, the Supreme Court drew a line. A very fuzzy line. A line that will be moved, shortened, twisted, and bent so often over time that it will disappear entirely. What eventually happens when the Supreme Court draws these fuzzy lines was made painfully clear just last week, when the line that was “public use” disappeared and became, instead, “private use”.

Read the rest of this entry…