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Supreme Court rules against Grokster

The verdict is in this morning and the Supreme Court has ruled against Grokster in MGM vs. Grokster.

Here’s a couple of key points from the article:

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that companies that sell file-sharing software can be held liable for copyright infringement.

(Emphasis mine) – Companies that market and sell P2P software for the sole purpose of infrigmenent is what the court is saying. Software such as bittorrent – which was developed to transfer large files such as movie trailers and linux distributions – wouldn’t be an issue. That, and bittorrent is free.

“One who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright … is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties using the device, regardless of the device’s lawful uses,” Justice David Souter wrote in the ruling.

The Supreme Court has remanded the case back to the lower court that originally ruled for Grokster.

The good news is that 1984’s Betamax ruling is still law. Devices made, that could infringe, can still be made. What the court has said is don’t create a device and market to the fact that it’s only made to infringe copyright. The bad news is, that burden of proof is now on the manufacturer’s to prove that they didn’t create and/or market to the fact that a device can infringe.

It’s not over yet. I’ll update the post when the EFF gets their opinion up.

Google to launch video service Monday

John Battelle’s blog has the whole story:

I’ve confirmed that Monday Google will launch an in-browser video playback feature based on the open source VLC media player. This is the logical next step for Google’s video search and upload function, which began taking uploads from anyone who cared to submit back in April.

Google will not disclose the raw numbers of videos that have been uploaded to date, but the company will make all those which were tagged as “free” available for real time streaming through the VLC player, which Google has modified and will make available for download Monday morning. The company also intends to make its VLC code available to the open source community as part of their Google code project.

This is big. Mr. Battelle goes on to theorize that this is a shot against Microsoft in the coming war as Windows Media Player is a stand-alone app with it’s own DRM issues.

VLC is a pretty cool project. I’ve been using it on Linux and Windows since January when The Current launched so I could listen to the AACPlus feed. VLC does it all – video, music, streaming, server, it’s a pretty amazing piece of software and it will be very interesting to see what Google has done to it and how it continues to evolve.

Joining the revolution



podcasting, originally uploaded by silwenae.

I’ve joined the podcasting revolution, and am now downloading podcasts like a madman. Shown here are iPodder on Ubuntu, and the new Monopod, a much more simpler and user friendly podcasting client. Both are running on Ubuntu Hoary.

I had a really tough time last weekend trying to get Monopod 0.2 to work, and this is 0.3 (I had to install a bunch of dev stuff). iPodder was ok, it’s the latest release that came out this week, but you have to chmod one file before it will work.

My two favorite podcasts so far are:

Acts of Volition and MAKE Magazine’s Podcast.

More to come, and a rant about my MP3 player.

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A bit warm

I flew back in from Atlanta yesterday. It’s cooler there, than it is here in Minnesota. That doesn’t seem quite right.

Turn your laptop into a picture fram

Turn your laptop into a hangable, on the wall, picture frame.

It has to be seen to be believed. Disassemble your laptop, mount it to a picture frame, and just follow the step by step instructions.

Think about it if he wasn’t using XP: you could take some really, really old laptops that can be had cheap and do a bunch of them using say, free software like Linux. 🙂

Nevertheless, a very cool hacking project.

Broadcast Flag not dead yet – we have 48 hours!

The EFF is reporting that Congress may sneak in the Broadcast Flag into other legislation in the next 48 hours. This is not trivial – HD content is available over the airwaves unmodified already today and the Broadcast Flag will stop that single-handedly – once it goes forward there will be no going back to using your media and your hardware the way you want to.

Fill out the Action Alert now and / or contact your Senators.

Just say no to the Broadcast Flag.

Required Reading

My new favorite magazine and website is brought to you by the geniuses behind Make Magazine.

From their website:

The first magazine devoted to digital projects, hardware hacks, and D.I.Y. inspiration.

It’s like Popular Science was, except for the 21st century.

The MAKE Blog is fantastic, updated often with lots of DIY tricks and links.

I even downloaded two of their Podcasts last week, and those were pretty good too.

The magazine is fantastic – it’s a quarterly, nice and thick, with information on what others are out there hacking on, one project with detailed step by steps per month, and tons of cool other articles.

O’Reilly has done it again.