Grokster

[2] Whether such downloads have substantially affected the retail sales of music, videos, and other works protected by copyright and the intellectual property laws is a matter of debate.

Grokster argued that proof of reasonable, actual or potential, non-infringing use, is sufficient to fulfill the "substantiality" requirement.

Among the amicus curiae briefs: In April 2003, Los Angeles federal judge Stephen Wilson ruled in favor of Grokster and Streamcast (providers of Morpheus P2P software) against the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America and held that their file sharing software was not illegal.

On 17 August 2004, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a partial ruling supporting Grokster, holding This appeal presents the question of whether distributors of peer-to-peer file-sharing networking software may be held contributorily or vicariously liable for copyright infringements by users.

On 25 March 2005, billionaire and former Broadcast.com owner Mark Cuban announced he would finance Grokster's fight in the Supreme Court.

But the future impact of the case may only be to require software companies to more carefully advertise their packages to discourage illegal downloading (see also inducement rule).

On 14 February 2006, the plaintiffs filed motions for summary judgment as to the liability of the remaining defendants, StreamCast and Sharman.

The screen text reads as follows: The United States Supreme Court unanimously confirmed that using this service to trade copyrighted material is illegal.

Following the shutdown of Grokster, blogs became inundated with concerned users fearful of the warning; however, there have been no reports of the use of doe subpoenas in this case.