Grokster Case Lives On… Judge Debates How Best To Kill Streamcast

Legal Issues

from the so-many-choices dept

Many people think that the Grokster lawsuit ended with the Supreme Court ruling over two years ago. However, that’s not the case. The Supreme Court was simply ruling on an aspect of the case (whether software providers were liable for what their users for doing) and then sent the case back to the lower court to then review its original decision. Grokster, whose name the case is most identified with, shut down, but Streamcast was also involved in the case and it decided to fight on, claiming that it did not “induce” infringement, and therefore was not guilty of copyright infringement. Unfortunately, the judge wasn’t convinced and still found the company guilty. Since then, there’s been an ongoing process of determining just what the punishment should be. The judge clearly hoped that Streamcast would make life easy by settling, but the company is nothing if not persistent in standing by its various lawsuits. Ed Felten points out that the judge is now trying to carefully weigh the punishment options for Streamcast, which seems rather odd, because it’s pretty clear that no matter what the punishment, Streamcast is done. There’s basically no way for the company to stay in business after losing this case, so Felten can’t figure out why the company would keep fighting this — though, the longer it stays alive, the more chances the RIAA has to claim yet another victory over the company.

Filed Under: business models, copyright, file sharing, inducement, p2p
Companies: grokster, streamcast