My colleague Fred von Lohmann is the brilliant IP attorney who kicked the RIAA/MPAA's ass in the Grokster case, legalizing P2P networks. The entertainment companies have asked the Supreme Court to review the ruling, effectively seeking to overturn "Betamax," the doctrine that says that it's legal to make general-purpose tools, even if some of your customers do naughty things with them. Fred's written a blistering op-ed about this on the EFF site:
First, the entertainment industry is plainly mounting a frontal attack on the Betamax doctrine, seeking a radical rewrite of secondary liability principles.
Often described as the Magna Carta of the technology industry, the Betamax doctrine makes it clear that innovators need not fear ruinous litigation from the entertainment industry so long as their inventions are "merely capable of substantial noninfringing uses." In today's petition, the entertainment industry urges the Court to reverse that established rule and impose on innovators a "legal duty either to have designed their services differently to prevent infringing uses, or to take reasonable steps going forward to do so." Of course, on that view, Sony's Betamax VCR would never have seen the light of day, since Sony could have designed it differently (in fact, the movie studios suggested back in 1978 that Sony implement a "broadcast flag" system!) or modified it after Disney complained.
Second, the entertainment industry appears to think that it can treat the Supreme Court and Congress interchangeably in pushing for its preferred re-write of copyright law.
Having just been rebuffed by the Senate Judiciary Committee on the Induce Act, the entertainment oligopolists now demand that the Supreme Court rewrite the Copyright Act for them. The entertainment industry lawyers think this case is about how "principles of secondary liability apply to the unprecedented phenomenon of Internet services."
(via Copyfight)
