Grokster Decision

Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled in favor of MGM and against file-sharing companies StreamCast and Grokster. Open Source public radio show and blog interviewed Jack Valenti, former head of the MPAA; Josh Wattles, a lawyer who serves as council for both Paramount and Gnutella; JD Lasica, author of DarkNet and head of ourmedia.org; and Michael Weiss, CEO of StreamCast. Interesting debate. Wattles says, “They probably deserve to win one. There really is mass use of copyrighted works completely uncompensated.” But Weiss maintains that “Even the VCR was used originally for infringement. Software originally used for infringement may be non-infringing substantially in the future life cycle. Take home video rental, for example; Jack Valenti, of all people, went to Congress to say this is bad, that we’re not going to be able to sell any movie tickets.” Also, see the TechnologyReview.com article on the case.