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September 13, 2006
Grokster Website
By Eric Goldman
I wanted to see what was going on now at the Grokster website, so I checked out www.grokster.com today. I got this stern lecture:
The United States Supreme Court unanimously confirmed that using this service to trade copyrighted material is illegal. Copying copyrighted motion picture and music files using unauthorized peer-to-peer services is illegal and is prosecuted by copyright owners.
There are legal services for downloading music and movies. This service is not one of them.
YOUR IP ADDRESS IS [redacted] AND HAS BEEN LOGGED. Don't think you can't get caught. You are not anonymous.
In the meantime, please visit www.respectcopyrights.com and www.musicunited.org to learn more about copyright.
I'm not sure I agree with the characterization of the Supreme Court opinion. But I love the fact that they logged the IP address of an academic researcher merely because I visited the site's home page. Although, I'll admit, that sure does sound scary!
Posted by Eric at September 13, 2006 03:49 PM | Copyright
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Eric Goldman recently visited Grokster’s website at www.grokster.com and got the following stern warning:
The United States Supreme Court unanimously confirmed
that using this service to trade copyrighted material is illegal.
Copying copyrighted... [Read More]
Tracked on September 13, 2006 05:13 PM
Comments
Actually, both the Grokster and eDonkey sites are now good mechanisms for determining what your IP address is, much like whatsmyip.org. A service like this is useful for a variety of network admin tasks. It would be mighty amusing if people just started using these sites for this service -- all too fitting to have the RIAA pay for the bandwidth for network admin services.
Posted by: Fred von Lohmann at September 13, 2006 04:30 PM
Hilarious. Here's the registry info for who owns that domain now - wonder who is actually making these threats...
Domain Name: GROKSTER.COM
Registrar: TUCOWS INC.
Whois Server: whois.opensrs.net
Referral URL: http://domainhelp.tucows.com
Name Server: NS2.EV1SERVERS.NET
Name Server: NS1.EV1SERVERS.NET
Status: ACTIVE
EPP Status: ok
Updated Date: 04-Sep-2006
Creation Date: 21-Dec-1999
Expiration Date: 21-Dec-2006
Posted by: Michael Zimmer at September 13, 2006 07:29 PM
"The United States Supreme Court unanimously confirmed that using this service to trade copyrighted material is illegal."
Um . . . in what case did that happen?
Posted by: Eric R. at September 14, 2006 05:25 AM