P2P War Takes Bad Turn for Hollywood
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August 20, 2004
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see k=link for the rest of the story! P2P War Takes Bad Turn for Hollywood
By Roy Mark
Since peer-to-peer (P2P) exploded on the scene in the late 1990's, the entertainment industry has waged legal war against the distributive technology that sparked the greatest raid on copyrighted music in history.
Hollywood drove the first Napter out of business and flooded other P2P companies with expensive litigation. The industry threatened lawsuits against corporations that permitted employees to install the file-swapping software. Last year, the media moguls began suing individuals who download copyrighted material through P2P networks.
Thursday, though, the legal war took a calamitous turn for Hollywood.
Upholding a lower court decision issued in April of 2003, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled P2P technology is legal even if the software itself is used for illegal purposes.
"The technology has numerous other uses, significantly reducing the distribution costs of public domain and permissively shared art and speech, as well as reducing the centralized control of that distribution," Judge Sidney R. Thomas wrote in a unanimous opinion.
The three-judge panel acknowledged that copyright violations do occur on the decentralized P2P networks, but the companies owning and distributing the enabling software cannot be held liable for the infringements.
"We live in a quicksilver technological environment with courts ill-suited to fix the flow of Internet innovation," Thomas wrote. "The introduction of new technology is always disruptive to old markets, and particularly to those copyright owners whose works are sold through well-established distribution mechanisms."
As legal precedent, the court cited the landmark Sony Betamax case video recorder case of 20 years ago, in which Hollywood studios tried to make Sony responsible for the copyright infringements of Betamax owners who videotaped programming off their televisions. Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court said the use of new technology to infringe copyrights did not justify an outright ban on that technology.
A significant key to the decision was the court's distinction between Napster's original service and the P2P software now offered by Grokster and Morpheus, the principal defendants in the case.
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