SAN FRANCISCO — One day in the early 1970s, as the Vietnam War dragged on and the antiwar movement gathered steam, students at the University of Pennsylvania seized the campus quadrangle and barricaded themselves behind its iron gates.
Mayor Frank L. Rizzo sent in the Philadelphia police. Just so there would be no misunderstanding, the cops rolled up in a Sherman tank with a 75-millimeter cannon.
"Everyone sort of assumed it wasn't loaded, but no one wanted to find out," Michael H. Page, a former Penn philosophy major who was among the demonstrators that day, recalled recently. "We declared victory and left."
Page now is a lawyer at Keker & Van Ness in San Francisco, surrounded by high-tech clients instead of antiwar activists. But when he signed on to defend Grokster, the five-person company behind a controversial online file-sharing network, he ran into the courtroom equivalent of a Sherman tank: the massed force of the major record companies, music publishers and Hollywood studios.
And this time, he really did win.
Grokster and other file-sharing systems let users find and copy music, movies and software from one another's computers. They're like giant neighborhood garage sales, but everything is free and supplies are unlimited.
The music industry blames widespread file sharing for slumping CD sales, and the movie industry fears it will have the same problems as soon as consumers have faster connections to the Internet. The industries have sued the most popular file-sharing companies, winning pretrial rulings that shut down the popular Napster Inc. and Aimster networks.
Late last month, however, U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson in Los Angeles ruled that Grokster and Streamcast Networks Inc., which distributes Morpheus file-sharing software, didn't violate the studios' or labels' copyrights. Although Wilson found that songs and movies were being copied illegally on those networks, he said the two companies weren't liable because they didn't monitor or control users' behavior.
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Industry Strategy
The ruling, which the entertainment companies plan to appeal, blew a gaping hole in the industry's anti-piracy strategy and legitimized a legion of file-sharing upstarts. By helping firms such as Grokster grow stronger, the decision also may increase the pressure on entertainment companies to work with file-sharing networks.
