Sony after Grokster

Given the Court's unanimity, I'm impressed by the lack on consensus on what the Sony standard means, these days. Souter's majority opinion seems to have been carefully crafted to avoid saying -- he tells us that the lower courts erred when they concluded that Sony controlled, and then does a few somersaults to avoid telling us what the correct application of Sony might or might not be. Ginsburg's opinion (joined by the Chief Justice, who signed on to Blackmun's dissent in Sony) tells us that Streamcast and Grokster should get no comfort from Sony, since the magitude of non-infringing uses of their software is too small to count as "substantial." Breyer (joined by Stevens, who authored the Sony majority, and O'Connor, who provided his fifth vote and some of his rationale) goes to great lengths to demonstrate that Grokster and Streamcast c should be absolved by the Sony standard, although the opinion then agrees that they should nonetheless be held liable for active inducement of infringement.

Comments

[Thad Anderson]

One thing that is interesting is the Court's discussion of Grokster's advertising, which called the software a competitor to Napster, and emails from Grokster executives to users about copyright issues.

If this was a significant part of the case against Grokster, would have happened with BitTorrent (which did not have this type of promotion) as the defendant, rather than Grokster?

Speaking of BT, here is a BitTorrent link to a 313 kB zip file containing the Court's opinion and the concurrences by Justices Ginsberg and Breyer.

http://24.90.150.65:6969/torrents/Grokster_Decision.zip.torrent?6978B04BAD5CC5A7A8E0B9BB7F21DDA5773FF123