FSF files amicus brief in Supreme Court music-sharing case
by
Matt Lee
Contributions
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Published on
Mar 01, 2005 10:52 AM
The Free Software Foundation today will file an amicus brief in support of its colleagues at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who are representing Grokster, Ltd. and others before the US Supreme Court in MGM v. Grokster, which will be heard at the end of this month.
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld the District Court's conclusion that peer-to-peer filesharing services that have no centralized directory and no centralized filtering or control of content shared are not liable for contributory copyright infringement even if most of the use to which the filesharing services are put infringes copyrights. The FSF's amicus brief argues that this conclusion should be affirmed, and that the movie industry is essentially arguing that it should be allowed to determine the technical design of the network itself.
You can download a PDF copy of the brief here.