P2P Wins in Supreme Court, RIAA Claims Victory by George Ziemann -- June 27, 2005 No matter what media you get your information from, today it is all bustling with the news of the entertainment industries' victory in the Supreme Court. Hilary Rosen is all aflutter, pissing her pants because she's so happy. She's so happy because she's so stupid, but she's certainly not alone in her delusion. The most-published quote was this one: "The most important message from today's historic decision is that progress and innovation do not have to come at the expense of recording artists, songwriters and the people who make their living in the entertainment industry," -- Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman MGM/RIAA/MPAA did not win anything in today's decision. Neither did Grokster. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or stupid. Form your own opinion on Bronfman's vague non-statement. The entertainment anagrams were asking for a summary decision by the Supreme Court saying that peer-to-peer applications were not protected by the Sony Betamax decision because there are no legitimate "commercially significant" non-infringing uses, or certainly not enough to justify p2p's existence. That didn't happen. The Supreme Court did not declare filesharing applications to be illegal. They also did not proclaim Grokster and other p2p companies as innocent merely because there are some legal files available. Both sides were asking for a summary judgement. Neither one got it. All the Supreme Court has done is send the RIAA/MPAA back to the lower courts to decide the very issues that the RIAA/MPAA had asked to be accepted as fact in their summary judgement. They have to go back and prove intent and inducement to infringe on copyrights. The Court said: "We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties" (emphasis added). What the RIAA wanted was for Grokster and file-sharing to be declared illegal, in toto, which would have the side effect of also shutting down things like the Internet Archive and NASA's shared knowledge. They didn't get that. The Supreme Court did not rule that peer-to-peer has no legal use and must be shut down at all costs. This means that P2P itself, as a technology, won. This should put an end to all of the silly bantering about whether or not file-sharing is legal. It is. Accepting that underlying principle protects the Internet Archive, NASA and everyone else already doing the right thing. It moves the focus away from criminalizing a tool as opposed to finding out who used it, why, and whether or not that particular use actually constituted a crime. The industry got permission to go after the Groksters and Streamcasts, individually, based on intent, motive and evidence of inducement to infringe on copyrights. But now it doesn't matter what happens to any one p2p network. The RIAA has to go back to a lower court, submit actual evidence and prove a case, something it hasn't done once out of 12,000 civil suits against consumers, another batch of which is due out any moment. The Supreme Court has told the p2p software companies to start filtering out the RIAA or else be liable. The RIAA can sue you if you don't and Grokster looks guilty as hell from where they sit. End of story. Beyond that, they decided nothing. I do not see a down side to the Supreme Court telling p2p companies they are liable for damages for allowing RIAA music to be shared on their networks. In fact, I urged them to do exactly this back before the oral arguments were heard. Filter them out. Block them. Delete them. Erase the RIAA bastards from your hard drive or join the line of people being sued. Everything is still going by the original 1920s script. It has not wavered in the slightest.