U.S. Supreme Court rules against file sharing application developers

Their seems to be finally some signs of laws getting stricter on file sharing applications. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that networks like Grokster and StreamCast Networks could be held liable for actions of the users of their peer-to-peer file-sharing services. The ruling came in the case between Grokster and MGM.

This is being looked upon as a major victory for the MPAA and RIAA agencies, which have been quite vocal against the services provided by these P2P applications. The case has been going on for a couple of years now and these agencies finally appealed to the highest courts in the country after failing to get favorable decisions from lower courts.

The plaintiffs claimed that the sole purpose of these applications were to enable the user to share protected content over the Internet. Their argument was that these developing companies were equally responsible for the actions of the users of these P2P applications. The main question before the courts was to decide on whether the companies involved can sue the P2P application developers being used to illegally share protected content.

This ruling is a major boost to their efforts as they can now sue these companies in the lower courts for the action taken by the end user! Analysts call this disturbing news as it might lead to revolutionary technologies suffering due to legal hassles leading to few innovating companies taking the chance to release their efforts.