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Another attempt at news

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Johnny C:
Don't mess it up this time. Anyone with any kind of background in law: What does this mean to the consumer? What does it mean to smaller, independent bands and artists who used filesharing to spread the message? I'm assuming it won't mean as much to the latter category; A Ghost Is Born enjoyed pretty dern good sales for an indie album which lacked singles and was available for download before its actual release.

Still, kind of unsettling that one of the earliest forays into online music distribution has been shut down (even if it was, you know, P2P).

Something Witty:
After skimming, it means this, based on my semi-legal background(Living with a Lawyer for almost 20 years):

Basically, in the pursuit of more money, and in an effort to put a stop to new P2P software coming out, making it easier to download songs/movies/whatever, the companies that have the problem with Copyright Infringement are attempting to make those who produce the P2P software responsible for the so called "Pirating" of software and music and whatnot partially respionsible for the pirating done with their software, hopefully resulting in little/no more P2P style software.


It's just more of the Media tryign to shut down the internet pirates.

Mnementh:
Basically what happend is the Supreme Court didn't change anything.  They are simply allowing trial to proceed on this matter.  The out come of the trial in the lower courts will then determine the legal requirements of P2P software companies.

Honestly though, a lot of software companies have to perform some basic due diligence to determine who the end user is and what they will be doing with the software.  My company is not allowed to sell software to people who have been stripped of the right to export or other parties/countries the US Gov't determines to be a risk to national security.  Due diligence is rather simple, a quick call asking the person if they are the party listed on the State Departments list is enough to sell to an individual with a matching name, and an end use statement from users in most foriegn countries considered a risk is enough.

However, most people would rather scream about the man keeping them down.

MilkmanDan:
Yeah, but no-one's talking about Grokster selling software to countries deemed a risk to national security. They are trying to sue the hell out of them becuase people use their free software to download copyrighted materials. It's not 'basic due dilligence', it's bullshit. Next they'll be suing Al Gore for inventing the internet!
The precident of Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios on the VCR debate should tell MGM to fuck right off, but I don't know. I hope so, because the precident it would set would fuck up all innovation for basically ever.

Samari:
It's not as simple as that though.  The reason that SCOTUS found the way it did is because they saw clear evidence that the intent of the Grokster team was to create and promote the software for the purpose of infringing on copyrights.  The Court was very deliberate in their ruling to leave the Betamax decision untouched and actually said that if it weren't for the company's actions indicating their intent to profit from copyright infringement the Court would have found that they were supported by the Betamax decision.  So basically this case falls outside the umbrella of Betamax and nothing about this case reduced that protection.  

MGM didn't really get what they were hoping for.  They really wanted to be able to weaken the Betamax precedent and that didn't happen.

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