The entertainment industry and file sharing companies are set for a battle Supreme

The U.S. Supreme Court will hold a landmark hearing Tuesday in MGM v. Grokster, an intellectual property case that will help set the legal boundaries for copying files from the Internet.The case pits the entertainment industry against companies that offer file sharing services. A group of 28 movie and record companies are fighting StreamCast (the distributor of Morpheus) and Grokster, the peer-to-peer software firms.Tuesday’s hearing is part of an appeal by the entertainment industry of a federal judge’s ruling last year in the case against the file-sharing firms. The judge found that the defendants shouldn’t be held liable for end users committing copyright infringement, citing the 1984 Sony Betamax case, where Sony won the right to sell its home video tape recorder while the movie industry fought to ban VCR sales...
Last Years Ruling was favorable... "The introduction of new technology is always disruptive to old markets...Yet, history has shown that time and market forces often provide equilibrium in balancing interests, whether the new technology be a player, piano, a copier, a tape recorder, a video recorder, a personal computer, a karaoke machine, or an MP3 player. Thus, it is prudent for courts to exercise caution before restructuring liability theories for the purpose of addressing specific market abuses..."