So the Supreme Court ruled against Grokster today … the good news is that their ruling is, shall we say, open to interpretation.
Ahem, “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…”
So yes, Hollywood and the recording industry will use this ruling to attempt to sue all these various P2P firms. So what? They’ve been doing that for five years. Now luckily, we the software community can get around this by just not promoting it for anything. It’s a peer-to-peer networking application. Done. What can you do with it? Hell, I don’t know. You can make toast with it for all I care.
I’m going to bet that absolutely zero will change from this ruling … I mean, we expected it all along, didn’t we? The Supreme Court is kinda … well, old school.
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