Grokster Decision Affirmed by 9th Circuit

Today the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court’s decision in MGM v.Grokster (pdf) that distributors of software using the Gnutella and FastTrack peer-to-peer technologies are not liable for copyright infringement committed by users of the defendants’ software. The court hewed closely to the standards set forth in Supreme Court’s seminal Sony-Betamax decision and held that, because the technologies do not utilize a central server, defendants are not liable for copyright infringement under either contributory copyright infringement or vicarious liability theories. Berkman Center Co-Director Jonathan Zittrain comments in a story for today's New York Times that the case may show "the limit of what the federal judiciary is prepared to do to help [copyright holders] in their cause." Read the full decision and this NYT report.