Decentralized second-generation file-sharing services raise issues that only the U.S. Supreme Court or Congress can resolve By Roger Parloff
Morpheus Falling · 2003
December will mark the fourth anniversary of the recording industry’s suit against the first peer-topeer file-sharing service, Napster. In that case, the federal courts shut Napster down on the grounds it was helping its users to obtain copyrighted works without compensating their creators. Now the battle between purveyors of filesharing technology and makers of digital content has entered a major new phase, as courts address second-generation systems that provide the means of distributing copyrighted material with