Quick Analysis of Supreme Court Opinion on MGM vs Grokster
There’s been a lot of talk about the Grokster case, but yesterday, an opinon was reached by the US Supreme Court on the matter, which essentially over opposes the the earlier decision made in March, made in Groksters favour. There are many doom and gloom mongers out there predicting that the end is nigh, but the opinion if the court justices could have (in my opinion been far harsher).
Detailed background of this case can be found at the pages of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
A few of my thoughts on the matter follows:
The Original Decision can be found here
The summary from page 20 onwards uses the following statements:
Three features of this evidence of intent are particularly notable……
- Each company showed itself to be aiming to satisfy a known source of demand for copyright infringement…….
- This evidence of unlawful objective is given added significance by MGM’s showing that neither company attempted to develop filtering tools or other mechanisms to diminish the infringing activity using their software.
- There is a further complement to the direct evidence of unlawful objective. It is useful to recall that StreamCast and Grokster make money by selling advertising space, by directing ads to the screens of computers employing their software.
The court then goes on to say…
This evidence alone would not justify an inference of unlawful intent, but viewed in the context of the entire record its import is clear. The unlawful objective is unmistakable.
In my laymans opinion, the original decision was overturned *just*, and only just, additionally, without the “promotion” aspect of encouraging the sharing of copyrighted content, I sincerely expect that the case would’ve gone Groksters way.
“Speak in Haste, Repent at Leisure”
