More IP News

In the US, the Supreme Court heard arguments in the MGM v. Grokster case on tuesday. Essentially, the recording industry has thus far gotten lower courts to overturn the "Betamax" standard, by which technologies which infringe copyright are allowed if there are "substantial non-infringeing uses." So the hope is that the Supreme Court will reinforce Betamax, and rule against the RIAA. Luckily, the Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that the justices seem to understand what the issues at stake are:

Over and over, the justices hammered the lawyer for the RIAA and MPAA with questions about the potential impact of a ruling in their favor against small inventors -- the "guy in the garage" as Justice David Souter put it. Justice Stephen Breyer also grilled MGM's attorney about whether lawyers who advise technologists -- for example, the inventor of the next iPod -- could give any assurance at all to their clients under MGM's rule that he would not be sued at some point down the road for copyright infringement.

Justice Scalia was also skeptical of the plaintiffs' arguments, questioning whether their proposed "primary use" test made any sense, given that the balance of lawful versus unlawful uses of technology are constantly changing.

Look, there are reasonable philosophical arguments that file-sharing is not "theft" in the traditional sense of the word, but I'm not going to go over that here. I don't really think it's defensible. More important here is the incumbents in this market using the weight of their legal power to destroy competition. Every new communications technology in the last century has thrived on what was at the time a violation of Intellectual Property. Rather than crush films, radio, or cable television, the law learned to accomodate them. So it's good to see that at least three judges are skeptical of the RIAA and MPAA. But we still need two more to win.