Law Commons^™

Comment: Sony, Fair Use, And File Sharing, Stacey Dogan

Faculty Scholarship

In this short Commentary, I would like to explore just one of the interesting strands developed in her paper-the scope of personal fair use in Sony, and its implications for peer-to-peer file sharing. More specifically, I want to reflect on the suggestion that Sony's broad exemption for personal copying has eroded into something unrecognizable, and that it is this erosion-rather than any difference between file-sharing and time shifting-that explains the courts' hostility to the fair use defense in the peer-to-peer context.

Yours For Keeps: Mgm V. Grokster, Max Oppenheimer

All Faculty Scholarship

In MGM v. Grokster, now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, all parties have made the assumption that most P2P file transfers infringe copyrights. Two theories contradict that assumption: a significant number of individuals who transfer files over P2P networks may have a license to do so, and the Copyright Act itself may exempt the transfer of certain categories of entertainment files over P2P networks from the definition of infringement.

The Future Of Copyright, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Review of Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity by Lawrence Lessig (2004).

Sometimes technological change is so profound that it rocks the foundations of an entire body of law. Peer-to-peer (P2P) filesharing systems--Napster, Gnutella, KaZaA, Grokster, and Freenet3--are mere symptoms of a set of technological innovations that have set in motion an ongoing process of fundamental changes in the nature of copyright law. The video tape recorder begat the Sony substantial noninfringing use defense. The digital cassette recorder begat the Audio Home Recording Act. The internet begat the Digital …