Rule of Law

Ruling in favor if MGM Studios in the case of Grokster v. MGM Studios, the Supreme court set a new precedent for all cases in the rulings of peer-to-peer sharing on the internet in the fact of copyrighted material. It is now completely as illegal to go buy “Soul Plane”, copy it onto your hard-drive, burn out 15 copies and sell them on the corner as it is to upload them onto a Limewire server or a Napster server or a PirateBay server and distribute it worldwide to anyone who wants to take the time to download it for a free and potentially steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from the publishers of that film. Giving within the family is still legally allowable, and sites have been able to get around the copyright barrier by setting themselves up with database servers overseas and outside of the jurisdiction of the United States and as “.org” sites in order to not be held accountable as they would be if they were “.com” or “.net” domains. It’s a matter of time until other governments allow the United States to enter their internet and persecute these criminals but until then it’s the ignorant and inanely stupid that load onto American servers with American domains and get caught by American officials.