Well, the Grokster decision came out earlier this week. So many things going on in law school (and more things are going non-linear in national politics), I only managed to scan the decision. or read blog entries about the decision. The most important holding seems to be:
“We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties.”
So, the judgment does not apply to P2P technology in general. The architecture, the technology, the use thereof—not illegal.But directing the technology (inducement) towards copyright infringement is. Fair enough. However, as my Constitutional Law prof would often ask: “What is the test?”. What constitutes an affirmative step ans/or a clear expression? The fuzzy “inducement test” that the Court used to draw the line can cover so many legitimate applications. As Cory Doctorow wonders:
Burning a copy of a CD isn’t necessarily infringement, but it is if you give it to a friend, or maybe even if you loan it to her, so does the marketing phrase “Rip, Mix, Burn� qualify as inducement to infringe? Could Apple be sued? It’s unclear. But you can be sure that the in-house counsel at a technology company will err on the side of caution—as will the investors in every potential new garage start-up. Such seemingly innocuous statements as “E-mail larger attachments with Outlook� or “Play MP3s on your Sony-Ericsson phone� could qualify as inducement to infringe under this ruling.
The good news is that it’s a US Supreme Court Decision, so it doesn’t bind us. The bad news is that US decisions have a “persuasive” weight in our jurisdiction. Grokster can cast its long shadow in our country, and a P2P company wil find it harder to make a case here as well.
Entries (RSS)
July 2nd, 2005 at 1:03 pm
The word of the week is inducement i.e. p2ps encourage its users to pirate copyrighted content. Kinda like if you’re the President and you talk to an appointee and say to him if you can lead by a million votes. You’re not telling him to do it but you’re ‘inducing’ him to do it. hehe.
July 2nd, 2005 at 1:26 pm
ey mark. may nag setup na ba ng the secret diary of gloria arroyo? baka napagod. ako personally, i don’t want to stick my neck out only to have erap back. or, dog forbid, susan roces.
July 2nd, 2005 at 4:10 pm
heh. Won’t be surprised if there’s one. they would be hard-pressed to find humor or satire in it since everything after PGMA’s confession would be farce. At this point though personally, I’m just hoping alien tripods would rise from the ground and take every politician born before 1972.
I’ve set a quicktag for President Noli de Castro in my blog-setting just in case.