CASE STUDY

Case Study Of A Criminal Case That Was Heard In The United States Supreme Court

Case Study Of A Criminal Case

Criminal Case

A copyright is a law that was passed to protect authors of books, magazine articles, plays, movies, songs, dances, recordings as well as ideas. In order to protect ones copyright, he or she must register with the Copyright Office in Washington, D.C. with two copies of the work. This is the only way an author can protect his or her work. For 70 years the work is protected under the copyright law. Anyone or any company that wants to use this protected work must first be issued a license from the copyright holder. Usually a fee of some type is contracted and the license user is free to use the copyright work. Unfortunately, sometimes two companies will have a dispute as to the protected work and how it is distributed. Especially now with the internet and the ability to have file-sharing using peer to peer networks.

United States Supreme Court

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studio Inc., which is a group of moves studios and other copyright holders, sought damages and an injunction against Grokster and other software companies. The responders sued the respondents for copyright infringements. The responders alleged that the respondents knew and intentionally distributed their software in order to send copyrighted songs and movies to other users. The responders alleged that this was a complete violation of the Copyright Act. Grokster denied the claim and used the Sony v. Universal Studios as an example of what they were doing was legal. Grokster Ltd was a privately owned software company, based in Nevis, West Indies. In 2001, Grokster Ltd. utilized the FastTrack protocol. This software enabled users from his or her computers to share music or movies. Other software companies followed and distributed their own version of peer to peer sharing. (Wikipedia, 2008)

None of the movies or music ever passed through Grokster computers, thus the respondents claimed that they did not violate any copyright laws. Grokster as well as other software companies claimed that they only assigned certain user computers as root super nodes that worked as a hub for Grokster. Grokster claimed that any specific downloads where at the discretion of the user and not Grokster. Hence here lies the problem with Grokster's software. One person could buy a movie or a compact disk of music and proceed to share with other Grokster's software users. Only one purchase is made from one user and then shared with other users. As more users started to use the Grokster's software, more movies and songs were being shared. (Wikipedia, 2008)

Crime

Grokster did not make any money from any of the sharing and or the selling of the Grokster software. Grokster and other software companies never sold their software to consumers. Grokster made money by selling ads on their space. MGM and the responders claimed that they were losing money by this type of sharing. The estimation of downloaded files was 90% of illegal ...