The year of the music licensing legal wars
B y By the time MGM v. Grokster hit the Supreme Court, the file-sharing industry had been roiling with lawsuits for years. The record labels had sued Napster in December 1999, baptizing the oughties with a spree of copyright litigation. But the public’s appetite for piracy didn’t go away, and for every Napster that was sued into oblivion, three more sprung up in its place. Their names are now commemorated only in the court decisions that eventually destroyed them: Aimster, StreamCast, and of course, Grokster.
The Supreme Court agreed to hear the Grokster case in December 2004, and oral arguments took place in March of the following year. The copyright wars had finally arrived before the justices. The court heard first from Don Verrilli, the attorney representing a bevy of movie studios and record labels belonging to the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, respectively. “Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court: copyright infringement is the only commercially significant use of the Grokster and StreamCast services, and that is no accident.”
The first interruption came halfway into Verrilli’s next sentence, and the volley of questions continued before this case about peer-to-peer file sharing took a sharp turn into what, to a total outsider, might have seemed like an off-beat question: What’s the difference between file sharing and the Xerox machine?
