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Supreme Court rulings raise concerns about broadband growth: Page 2 of 4

Hollywood studios sought a tougher ruling against actual users of file-sharing technology, Greenberg said, but "the beauty of this rule is concentrating not on the behavior of the users, but on the behavior of technologists. Technology developers cannot make specific inducements to engage in infringing behaviors."

"Will this have a chilling effect on broadband use? Only time will tell," Greenberg added. "But peer-to-peer file sharing remains a generic technology. The Internet itself is one big copying machine. The studios may not like that, but let's not forget it, or try to pretend otherwise."

In a second ruling Monday, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in the case National Cable & Telecommunications Association vs. Brand X Internet Services that cable operators do not have to share high-speed lines with nonfacilities-based competitors. The requirement would have been similar to the one applied to local exchange carriers which are required to share facilities under the 1996 Telecommunications Reform Act.

Phone companies had seen their own requirements for line-sharing diminish under both FCC and court rulings over the last five years, so the ruling on cable operators surprised few. However, the Court effectively turned the hybrid fiber-coax network into a closed environment on either side of the cable headend — at least until the point where a cable network interfaces with the public-switched phone network.

In the file-sharing case, Justice Souter rejected lower court findings that there is no liability if the distributor has no knowledge of copyright infringement. Rather, Souter said, "One who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright . . . is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties."

That implies that developers of software intended for sharing files over multiple server networks, such as StreamCast and Grokster, can be found liable. Souter pointed out that StreamCast distributed its OpenNap directly in response to Napster's troubles, using compatible software interfaces with the Napster network and hoping to allow continued file-sharing through anonymous-host peering networks.