Thread: Supreme Court Rules Against Grokster
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Old 06-27-2005, 01:34 PM   #1
Bob Russell
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Supreme Court Rules Against Grokster
Slashdot is reporting that the Supreme Court has ruled...
Quote:
"One who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright ... is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties using the device, regardless of the device's lawful uses." The promotion is the key part of that statement.
What this means is practical terms is not obvious to me as I need someone more knowledgable to interpret. But as a novice podering the topic, it seems clear that any information relating to activities not clearly legal will not come from any source associated with a P2P service!

Also of interest would be what consequences this would have on software like Fair Use Wizard or DVD Decrypter (already hit by legal issues) or DVD Shrink, etc. In fact, even signal enhancement devices used to stabalize a signal from a VHS tape might be dependent on a ruling.

I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot about the fallout over the next few days.

For now, here are a couple of early articles that I plan to read myself as soon as I get a few minutes...
San Francisco Chronicle Article
EFF Article

If you have any good links or discussions about this case and the fallout (especially those with nice summaries and easy to read for the lay person) please post them as replies here so we can continue to learn what this all means.
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