Ask most 14-year-olds what GROKSTER is and they’ll all know it as a place to find music and movies. But if you ask record and film executives, they’ll tell you it is software that steals.
Yesterday the industry took their case against software developers Grokster and Streamcast to the Supreme Court. They’re claiming that 85 million songs and 400,000 movies are being illegally downloaded every day without a penny paid to artists.
Grokster says it only makes software and should not be held responsible for what users choose to do with it. They say their software is similar to technologies like the video camera and the Xerox machine and that shutting them down will hobble the development of future, and important technologies for the knowledge economy.
Guests:
Declan McCullough, CNET News Chief Political Correspondent
Daryl Friedman, VP of Advocacy for the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences
Lawrence Lessig, Law Professor at Stanford Law School and author of “Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity”
Fred von Lohmann, Senior Intellectual Property Attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, lead lawyer representing file-sharing entities.