{"id":3640,"date":"2004-12-11T12:51:52","date_gmt":"2004-12-11T16:51:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/2004\/12\/11\/agitated-over-grokster-cert\/"},"modified":"2004-12-11T12:51:52","modified_gmt":"2004-12-11T16:51:52","slug":"agitated-over-grokster-cert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/2004\/12\/11\/agitated-over-grokster-cert\/","title":{"rendered":"Agitated over Grokster Cert"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a985'><\/a><\/p>\n<p><P>Jonathan Zittrain spread <A href=\"http:\/\/news.com.com\/Supreme+Court+to+hear+P2P+case\/2100-1027_3-5487491.html\">the news<\/A> as part of <A href=\"http:\/\/cyber.law.harvard.edu\/is2k4\/home\">his keynote last night.<\/A>&nbsp; I&#8217;m glad my blurted &#8220;I don&#8217;t f-ing believe this&#8221; didn&#8217;t carry too far through the conference room.&nbsp; <\/P><br \/>\n<P>Tim Wu <A href=\"http:\/\/www.lessig.org\/blog\/archives\/002103.shtml\">laid out the case<\/A> for why the SC would grant cert. I only bought reasons 5-7, all of which explain but do not provide valid reason for the Court&#8217;s decision.&nbsp; See the <A href=\"http:\/\/www.eff.org\/IP\/P2P\/MGM_v_Grokster\/20041108_Final_Brief.pdf\"><EM>Grokster <\/EM>opposition to cert brief<\/A>&nbsp;and <A href=\"http:\/\/www.eff.org\/deeplinks\/archives\/001987.php\">FvL&#8217;s earlier post<\/A>, but let me summarize some reasons why the cert grant is unwarranted.<\/P><br \/>\n<P>The Court has gotten itself involved in <EM>Sony, Teleprompter, Fortnightly, <\/EM>etc., but that doesn&#8217;t provide any basis for getting involved here.&nbsp; Those cases all involved fairly novel issues.&nbsp;<EM>Sony <\/EM>already set the&nbsp;standard in this area.&nbsp;You can draw distinctions between P2P and everything that&#8217;s come before it.&nbsp; However, the underlying legal issues were already dealt with in <EM>Sony.&nbsp; <\/EM>Indeed, that was the whole rationale behind the <EM>Grokster <\/EM>decision.<\/P><br \/>\n<P>Moreover, the lower courts are still handling these issues just fine. There&#8217;s no circuit split that the Court needs to resolve.&nbsp; The conflict over the consequences of passing that test is the substantial divergence between <EM>Grokster<\/EM> and <EM>Aimster, <\/EM>but Posner&#8217;s <EM>Aimster<\/EM> opinion is almost entirely dicta;&nbsp;the&nbsp;holding was entirely based on Aimster&#8217;s inability to show substantial non-infringing uses.&nbsp; To the extent there is a conflict on that issue, it is minimal, and it&#8217;s not even clear that Posner&#8217;s standard in that narrow regard would not protect Grokster and Morpheus.&nbsp; <\/P><br \/>\n<P>Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Congress is already considering this very topic.&nbsp; Congress is entirely capable of fine-tuning the liability standards should it choose to do so.&nbsp; There is no urgent reason that the Court must solve this issue instead.<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jonathan Zittrain spread the news as part of his keynote last night.&nbsp; I&#8217;m glad my blurted &#8220;I don&#8217;t f-ing believe this&#8221; didn&#8217;t carry too far through the conference room.&nbsp; Tim Wu laid out the case for why the SC would grant cert. I only bought reasons 5-7, all of which explain but do not provide [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":72,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/72"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3640\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}