Freedom to Tinker

Alex, and others reporting on the Supreme Court arguments in the Grokster case, noticed that the justices seemed awfully interested in active inducement theories. Speculation has begun about what this might mean.

News.com is running a piece by John Borland, connecting the court discussion to last year’s ill-fated Induce Act. The Induce Act, which was killed by a unanimous chorus of criticism from the technology world, would have created a broad new category of liability for companies that failed to do enough (by vaguely defined standards) to prevent copyright infringement.

(The news.com piece has a terrible headline: Court mulls P2P ‘pushers’. This fails to convey the article’s content, and it drops the loaded word “pushers”, which appears nowhere in the article. The headline writer seems to acknowledge that the word doesn’t fit, by putting it in scare-quotes, which only highlights the fact that nobody is being quoted. Don’t blame John Borland; the headline was probably written by his editor. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a misleading headline from news.com.)

There’s a big difference between the Induce Act and the kind of narrow active inducement standard that was suggested to the court. Indeed, the main advocate to the court of an active inducement standard was IEEE-USA, which testified against the Induce Act. Here, as always, the details matter. A decision by the court to adopt an active inducement standard could be very good news, or very bad news, depending on the specifics of what the court says.

The worst case, in some respects, is probably the one Fred von Lohmann mentions in the article, in which the court endorses the general idea of an inducement standard, but doesn’t fill in the details. If that happens, we’ll be stuck with years and years of litigation to figure out what the court meant. Regardless, it seems likely that after the court announces its decision, Congress will consider Induce Act II.

Greetings Freedom to Tinker readers! I’m Alex Halderman, one of Ed Felten’s grad students at Princeton. I’d like to thank Ed for the opportunity to be a regular contributor to this site.

On Tuesday I had the privilege of attending the MGM v. Grokster oral arguments along with several students from Ed’s Information Technology and the Law seminar. The class spent weeks discussing the Grokster case, and our field trip to Washington afforded a rare opportunity to witness the legal process in person instead of just on paper. We camped overnight outside the court to secure seats for what proved to be a fascinating argument. Some of the students have posted commentaries [1, 2, 3] and photographs [1,2,3,4], of which this is my favorite.

It was difficult to tell what the Justices were thinking, since their questions deeply probed the arguments from both sides of the case, but I was left with the impression that they are leaning towards a revision or reinterpretation of secondary liability law. None of their questions directly addressed Grokster’s argument that the matter should be deferred to Congress, and Justice Scalia emphasized that the case certainly wouldn’t hinge on stare decisis. In contrast, what a new liability test might look like was a recurring theme.

MGM argued that businesses centered on infringement should not be seen as engaged in “substantially unrelated areas of commerce” as required by the Betamax test. Several Justices questioned whether this reading would make it too easy for copyright holders to intimidate creators of new technologies. Justice Breyer wondered whether the creators of the iPod, the VCR, or the Guttenberg press would have feared liability under such a test, Justice Scalia asked whether new technologies would need to be given a decade or more to prove their non-infringing uses before such a standard could be applied, and Justice Souter worried about the fate of lone innovators without access to expensive legal guidance (the “guy in his garage”). Clearly, Grokster’s council and amici have done a commendable job explaining these issues to the Court, and I’m relived to say that the worst-case outcomes, such as a complete replacement of the bright line protections for innovation afforded by the Betamax test, no longer seem likely.

On the other hand, some of the Justices were no more receptive to Grokster’s interpretation of the Betamax defense, under which products “merely capable of substantial non-infringing use” would not be subject to liability. Justice Ginsberg called this an overly simplistic reading of Sony and pointed out that the decision continues for 13 pages of nuanced discussion after the phrase cited by Grokster. She also emphasized differences between Grokster’s product and the Betamax: the primary use of the Betamax was found to be non-infringing, but the district court in the present case established that at least 90% of Grokster’s traffic infringed.

What most surprised me was that several Justices repeatedly asked about a standard barely mentioned in the main briefs from either side: a so-called “active inducement” test. Inducement is a concept borrowed from patent law under which parties can be held liable for encouraging others to misappropriate protected intellectual property. Tests based on active inducement were discussed in the U.S. Government’s amicus brief (filed in support of MGM) and in the IEEE’s amicus brief (filed in support of neither party). The Induce Act, debated in Congress last summer, would have created a test based on an inducement theory, but it was widely criticized for giving copyright holders too much control over new technologies and making it too easy for them to bring frivolous lawsuits. IEEE, which opposed the Induce Act, says its model of an inducement test would require a much higher standard of proof involving evidence that parites committed overt acts of encouragement, not merely that they failed to do all they could to prevent illegal copying.

Several questions about inducement came from Justice O’Connor, who cast the deciding vote in the Betamax case. She asked MGM’s lawyer whether inducement was a way to resolve the case. Along with Justice Scalia, she seemed skeptical of Grokster’s attempt to separate out its past actions that could be seen as inducing infringement. Those acts do apply to the current case, Scalia insisted, because they were what developed Grokster’s current clientele. Scalia also wondered whether an active inducement standard would go far enough. Couldn’t a successor build a product identical to Grokster, he asked, but escape liability by being careful not to induce? Both MGM’s counsel, Donald Verrilli, and Paul Clement, speaking for the Government, responded that inducement would not be a sufficient remedy. Creators of future file sharing products would be careful not to leave a paper trail documenting their inducement, Verrilli warned.

Despite these objections, I think it is plausible that the Court will craft a narrow active inducement test resembling the IEEE proposal. This is likely for several reasons. Such a test would be neutral with respect to technology, thus creating a precedent applicable to much more than peer-to-peer file sharing. It would be responsive to the worries of technologists by clearly defining how innovators would need to act to avoid liability, yet it would also allow the courts to hold Grokster accountable because of its past encouragement of infringement. Inducement would function as a parallel category of liability complementing Sony, so the Court could leave the celebrated Betamax test intact. With both rules in place, defendants would need to demonstrate substantial non-infringing uses of their products and refrain from overtly encouraging infringement. Perhaps the most attractive feature of an inducement test is that both the Government, which sided with the content industry, and the pro-technology IEEE support it in some form. This is the closest thing to a compromise that we have seen in the case. Neither Grokster nor MGM would be wholly satisfied with a narrow inducement test, but it could potentially cure the most imminent harms cited by the copyright owners while causing minimal collateral damage to innovation.

Now the waiting begins. We’ll find out what the Justices were really thinking in a few months when the Court issues its decision.