Internet Billionare Mark Cuban has announced his intention to financially support the EFF and Grokster. Cuban, who believes that any ruling could potentially hurt innocent businessmen like himself, announced his plans on his weblog; he said that "the EFF and others came to me and asked if I would finance the legal effort against MGM. I said yes. I would provide them the money they need."
Tomorrow, the US Supreme Court will hear the case of MGM vs. Grokster. Involving more than 28 of the world's biggest media companies, the lawsuit also includes P2P vendors Kazaa and Morpheus and attempts to set a precedent against other uses of p2p technology. Grokster is being defended by the EFF. The case has been brought to the Supreme Court after a lower court ruled in Grokster's favour, and the media companies appealed.
In a post on Saturday, Cuban remarked that "If Grokster loses, technological innovation might not die, but it will have such a significant price tag associated with it, it will be the domain of the big corporations only." He went onto say that "It wont be a good day when high school entrepreneurs have to get a fairness opinion from a technology oriented law firm to confirm that big music or movie studios wont sue you because they can come up with an angle that makes a judge believe the technology might impact the music business. It will be a sad day when American corporations start to hold their US digital innovations and inventions overseas to protect them from the RIAA, moving important jobs overseas with them."
The EFF plan to use the so called "Betamax" defence. "The copyright law principles set out in the Sony Betamax case have served innovators, copyright industries, and the public well for 20 years," said Fred von Lohmann, EFF's IP attorney. "We at EFF look forward to the Supreme Court reaffirming the applicability of Betamax in the 21st century."
View: EFF Information | Cuban's Blog
1 Comment - Add comment