The Bangus Ultimatum

The US Supreme Court’s decision on MGM v. Grokster is due tomorrow. Here’s the crib sheet from EFF, for anyone bracing for the outcome:

# It’s not about P2P. The P2P genie is irreversibly out of the bottle, with the software already installed on hundreds of millions of computers and developers in countries beyond the reach of American laws. It’s the rest of America’s innovation sector that will be living with the Supreme Court’s ruling. So, as you read what they have to say, ask how it will affect not just Apple, HP, and Intel, but also the next “genius in a garage,” like Sling Media or the kids developing urban vehicular grid technology.

# No matter what, we’ve won. From the beginning of this lawsuit, the entertainment industries pushed the lower courts to adopt extreme, outlandish interpretations of copyright law. For example, they argued that the Sony Betamax decision doesn’t apply at all to Internet technologies, and that simply knowing that somebody is using your technology to infringe triggers an obligation to redesign it. No matter what the Court may announce on Monday, it will not be adopting this extreme position. So remember what we’ve already won.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 26th, 2005 at 9:01 pm and is filed under Civil Rights, Cyber Law, General, Intellectual Property. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.