Grokster

» see grokster.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Grokster was the US-facing FastTrack client. The protocol was the same one Kazaa used (Dutch in origin), but the operators and the market it served were inside the United States, which is exactly what the recording industry needed to file suit in US courts. Grokster Ltd. itself was incorporated offshore in Nevis. From 2001 onward it spread by the same word-of-mouth that moved every other P2P client of the era. By 2003 it had hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users.

What made Grokster a household name was not its software. It was the lawsuit. MGM Studios v Grokster went to the Supreme Court and got a unanimous ruling on June 27, 2005. The Court invented a new legal theory called active inducement: if you distribute a tool while advertising or instructing its use for infringement, you are liable for what users do with it. Grokster had been doing exactly that. The ruling did not kill P2P, but it killed any company that tried to sell P2P inside US borders without a license.

I was on dial-up in Turkey when Grokster was at its peak, and I never installed it. The FastTrack network reached me through Kazaa Lite, which was the version everyone used in TR forums. Grokster was a brand I read about in news articles months after the fact. The Supreme Court ruling reached us through tech-press translations, and the file-sharing engineer crowd around frmtr and donanimhaber had a long thread about what "induced infringement" meant for eMule and DC++. The honest answer was: nothing yet, because none of those were US companies.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the shutdown notice ~

When Grokster's homepage went dark in November 2005, it was replaced by a notice that read like a hostage video. "The United States Supreme Court unanimously confirmed that using this service to trade copyrighted material is illegal." Then, in big text, "YOUR IP ADDRESS IS XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX AND HAS BEEN LOGGED." For most of the people who saw it, this was their first introduction to the phrase "active inducement." It was also their first introduction to the idea that the company they had been downloading software from might be cooperating with the RIAA on their way out.

~ what the ruling actually did ~

The doctrine the Court invented in Grokster is the reason every P2P or scraping tool today is careful with its marketing copy. You can build a tool with substantial non-infringing uses, Sony Betamax says so, but if your launch announcement or your in-app prompts encourage piracy, you lose the safe harbor. After 2005, every BitTorrent client's "about" page got rewritten to emphasize Linux ISO distribution and indie game patches. The actual users kept doing what they were doing, but the lawyers had been warned.

~ what got buried with it ~

StreamCast Networks, which made Morpheus, was a co-defendant in the same ruling and limped on for another three years before bankruptcy. Sharman Networks, which owned Kazaa, settled for $115 million in 2006 and pivoted to a paid music service that no one used. Grokster itself was the cleanest exit of the three, partly because it had the smallest user base to disappoint. Most of the people who learned the word "Grokster" learned it from a court filing rather than from using the product.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »