A court case involving all the major Hollywood players looks set to make or break the future of file sharing on the internet.

A consortium including AOL Time Warner, Disney, Paramount and Metro Goldwyn Meyer is now trying to stop net users downloading video and film content.

Last year, a similar case brought by the music industry giants effectively gagged Napster, the MP3 file sharing network. The Hollywood consortium is arguing that downloading film material infringes copyright in the same way.

This time it is file sharing network Morpheus that is under fire. But the company has legal support from the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF), and this time they believe they have a strong case.

"There is an important principle at stake here," said Fred von Lohmann, EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney. "Morpheus, as a technology that has numerous non-infringing uses, should be legal for the same reasons that VCRs, photocopiers, MP3 players, and CD burners are legal."

Morpheus software users currently access a broad variety of materials, including public domain texts, shareware programs like the WinZip file compression software, films and music videos.

Streamcast Networks, creators of the software, had asked the court to rule in favour of the technology on the basis of the "Betamax defense": the principle that a technology capable of non-infringing uses cannot be banned simply because some people may use it to infringe copyrights. The judge stated that it was too early to rule on this question, deciding instead to set the trial-by-jury date for October 1, 2002.

Digital freedom advocates also say there is an important technical difference between Napster and Morpheus. Napster held an index of all files - including those which infringed copyright - which its users were willing to share, putting it in the position of a trader who kept a list of stolen goods.

Morpheus, Grokster and other more recent file sharing networks operate like auctioneers, simply matching a file request by one user with an offer by another to provide it. This makes them more like the classified advertisements section of a newspaper, where the responsibility for the legality of goods rests with the buyer and seller of those items.

See also:
www.indexonline.org/news/20020315_internet.shtml
www.eff.org

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