Tag: Grokster Case

  • Grokster: The Case is Submitted

    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…

  • A (True) Story for Grokster Eve

    Recently I met a promising young computer scientist, whose name I will withhold for reasons that will soon be evident. He has developed a very interesting network software system that would be useful for a great many legitimate applications. I was impressed by his system and wondered why I hadn’t heard of it before. The…

  • Separating Search from File Transfer

    Earlier this week, Grokster and StreamCast filed their main brief with the Supreme Court. The brief’s arguments are mostly predictable (but well argued). There’s an interesting observation buried in the Factual Background (on pp. 2-3): What software like respondents’ adds to [a basic file transfer] capability is, at bottom, a mechanism for efficiently finding other…

  • Splitting the Grokster Baby

    David Post at the Volokh Conspiracy predicts, astutely, the outcome of the Grokster case. He predicts that the Supreme Court will try to split the baby by overturning the lower court decision (which Hollywood is asking for) while upholding the Sony Betamax doctrine immunizing designers of dual-use technologies from secondary liability (which technologists are asking…

  • Balancing Tests in the Grokster Briefs

    The biggest issue in the Grokster case is whether the Supreme Court adjusts or clarifies its precedent from the Sony Betamax case. The fate of Grokster itself is much less important than what ground rules the Court imposes on future innovators. The core of the Betamax opinion is this oft-quoted passage: The staple article of…

  • Grokster Briefs: Toward a More Regulable Net

    Many briefs were filed yesterday in Grokster, the upcoming Supreme Court case which has broad implications for technology developers. (Copies of the briefs are available from EFF.) There’s a lot to discuss in these briefs. Today I want to focus on two of the amicus briefs, one from the Solicitor General (who represents the U.S.…