Stories about: Grokster

The 2005 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Grokster v. MGM case is partly responsible for Viacom's dispute with Google ending up in court, an expert on copyright law said in a Sunday opinion piece in The New York Times newspaper.

Microsoft Tuesday said that reports published last month claiming that Google profited from sites pimping pirated movies and software show why copyright holders shouldn't trust the search company.

Thirteen U.S. record companies sued file-sharing system operator Lime Wire in a New York court on Friday, accusing it of music piracy and demanding damages that could top US$476 million.

In a dramatic close to the legal battle between file-sharing software developer Kazaa and the entertainment industry, Kazaa said on Thursday that it has agreed to pay at least US$100 million to four record companies and an additional amount to motion picture companies to settle two lawsuits.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) might just as well have sued Google for copyright violation rather than pick on Torrentspy, the smaller company said in a court filing this week seeking dismissal of the case.

The effort spearheaded in the US to require people building voice technologies to code in wiretapping from the beginning of development, is currently the gravest threat to cyber-freedom, according to Brad Templeton from the Electronic Frontier Foundation who spoke at AUUG 2005 today.

In the first ruling of its kind in Taiwan, a Taiwanese district court on Thursday found peer-to-peer (P-to-P) file-sharing software maker Ezpeer.com not guilty of violating copyrights. The groups responsible for raising the suit vowed to appeal.

Sharman Networks, the Australian company that owns the Kazaa file-sharing software, said Tuesday that it welcomes a US Supreme Court decision regarding file-sharing software that was announced a day earlier and has been widely interpreted as a victory for the entertainment industry.

Technology companies may shy away from inventing new products that could be used to violate copyright laws if the U.S. entertainment industry can sue the distributors of the Grokster and Morpheus P-to-P (peer-to-peer) software packages for their users' actions, some U.S. Supreme Court justices argued Tuesday.

A group of technology trade groups, consumer advocates and lawyers filed more than 20 briefs Tuesday in support of peer-to-peer (P-to-P) software vendors facing a U.S. Supreme Court showdown with the movie industry later this month.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear a case focusing on whether peer-to-peer (P-to-P) software vendors should be penalized for unauthorized file trading when their software is used.