By Steven Musil
http://news.com.com/Mark+Cuban+to+finance+Grokster+defense/2100-1032_3-5641530.html
Story last modified Sun Mar 27 14:30:00 PST 2005
Broadcast.com billionaire Mark Cuban has announced that he will finance Grokster's defense against MGM's peer-to-peer lawsuit, which is expected to be argued in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday.
Cuban, who sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion and is now president of HDNet, a provider of high-definition TV programming, wrote in a blog entry Saturday that he had agreed to fund software company's defense after the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others approached the billionaire.
b The controversial case centers on whether file-sharing software companies could be held legally responsible for copyright infringement on their networks.
Cuban said a Grokster loss would create a stifling legal situation that would virtually eliminate technological innovation in the United States.
"If Grokster loses, technological innovation might not die, but it will have such a significant price tag associated with it, it will be the domain of the big corporations only," Cuban wrote. "It will be a sad day when American corporations start to hold their U.S. digital innovations and inventions overseas to protect them from the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), moving important jobs overseas with them."
"It doesn't matter that the RIAA has been wrong about innovations and the perceived threat to their industry every single time," Cuban wrote. "It just matters that they can spend more then everyone else on lawyers."
The case itself focuses on Morpheus and Grokster, each of which are popular file-swapping applications that are widely used to trade movies, music and software.
Studios and labels sued the companies in 2001, following successful legal campaigns against peer-to-peer trailblazer Napster. Attorneys for the entertainment conglomerates said the newer file-swapping services were, like Napster, building businesses based on copyright infringement.
But Grokster and StreamCast were built around a different technology than Napster. Their services involved a highly decentralized network of individual computers trading files among themselves, rather than a network controlled from a central location.
Lower court judges ultimately said that the companies did not directly control what happens on their networks, and that their software could be used for legal purposes. That shields the companies themselves from legal responsibility for the actions of their users, the lower courts said.
