Judge Delays KaZaA Ruling

[JackSpratts]

Entertainment industry attorneys argued in a packed Los Angeles courtroom Monday that the new generation of music-trading networks, Morpheus and Grokster, are nothing short of Napster reborn -- with added features. They asked a federal judge to skip a trial and find the companies behind these networks guilty of contributing to widespread copyright infringement.

Attorneys for StreamCast Networks, the corporate parent of Grokster and Morpheus, say the companies are merely software vendors who are no more liable for what users do with their technology than Xerox is when someone makes unauthorized copies of a copyrighted published work.

The arguments reprise many of those made in the landmark copyright-infringement suit against Napster, which ultimately resulted in the service being shut down in July 2001. Then, as now, lawyers portray ``peer-to-peer'' technology, which enables one computer user to find and directly copy files from another user's computer hard drive, as the next Sony Betamax. That revolutionary video technology infuriated the entertainment industry, but was protected by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that found it had legitimate, as well as infringing, consumer uses.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...ey/4652610.htm

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LOS ANGELES - A federal judge in Los Angeles said today he was not ready to issue a summary judgment in a Napster-like lawsuit, saying that he needed more time to determine the fate of three popular file-sharing networks that have millions of users worldwide.
The hearing was seen as a critical legal battle in determining the future legality of online file-sharing, or peer-to-peer, or P2P, networks. Scores of P2P networks have sprung up over the past two years, largely modeled on Napster, the granddaddy of file-swapping services that was effectively put out of business in a lawsuit brought by the major music labels.

Judge Wilson did not specify when he would rule on the competing motions, or when he would decide whether foreign-based Sharman Networks, the parent company of Kazaa, should also be named in the suit.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/business/1685751

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A U.S. FEDERAL district court judge heard legal arguments Monday in a case that could help determine whether popular file-swapping services such as Morpheus and Kazaa will go the way of Napster or be permitted to thrive.

As expected, no ruling was issued after the two-hour hearing, in which attorneys for the music and motion picture industries squared off against lawyers for file-swapping systems Morpheus and Grokster. The judge is expected to issue a ruling in the coming weeks that will determine whether or not the case goes to trial, attorneys for both sides said.

"As we expected, the judge heard arguments for about an hour and a half and then didn't issue any order," said Fred von Lohmann, a senior intellectual property attorney with the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is assisting Morpheus with its defense.

"He clearly had a lot of questions and thought hard about the case, and at the end he said he'd give us an order shortly. I think it'll be at least a couple of weeks."

Observers expected the judge to take his time over any decision. Stacked one on top of the other, the motions filed in the case would form a pile of paper eight feet tall, giving the judge plenty to think about, von Lohmann said.
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn...se.xml?s=IDGNS

- js.