Supreme Court Unanimously Rules Against File Sharing Companies

Amongst a flurry of Supreme Court rulings on Monday, June 27th came the decision on the MGM v. Grokster case (as described here and here.)  The decision went in favor of  plaintiffs MGM et. al and set a precedent for legal action against the makers of file-sharing software.  

The decision was unanimous, presenting a court unified in this opinion and one that will probably not change its stance in the forseeable future.  

The decision called back to an earlier landmark case involving copyright infringement, when Universal sued Sony because the new VCR home appliance could be used to replicate home videos.  That case ended in a decison that created the idea that the offending party would have to be guilty of "inducement", or have significant intent for the dual-use product to be used for the illegal of the two.  The same concept was applied in this case, but in the opposite way.  While the Sony case ended in a victory for Sony because they were found not to have inducement,  the court in this case found that Grokster and Streamcast (makers of Morpheus) did, in fact, have a business model that depended heavily on the illegal use of its software.

The court also went on to contradict a lower courts opinion that the lack of any copyright enforcement by the software makers themselves did not constitute intentional facilitation of legal activity, writing in the decision that "evidence of unlawful objective is given added significance by MGM's showing that neither company attempted to develop filtering tools or other mechanisms to diminish the infringing activity using their software."  This statement may set the stage for software makers to integrate copyright enforcement into their software in a bid to avoid liability in these claims.

Related Links:
Electronic Frontier Foundation (A history of the case's progress through the judicial system and other documents)
Sony v. Universal