On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled on file-swapping services that are commonly used to illegally swap songs over the Internet (made famous by now-legal-service Napster). Click here for the article. According to the article that I read, Hollywood companies can sue file-swapping software companies but only if the company is encouraging illegal usage of their product. The judges did say that Hollywood could not sue if the company only knew that the product was being used in a wrong manner and was not encouraging such usage. This basically makes no changes to the current state of file-swapping services. Software companies will just have to be more careful on what they encourage and discourage on their products. This ruling doesn't bother me; I think it was a pretty good ruling on the part of the Supreme Court. One thing that is a little disturbing is that the article made no reference to any law or the Constitution for how the justices made their decision. The article did made a reference to how the justices wanted to protect software developers. I think that is a great idea to protect innovation, but justices should be refering to the law on the books and not just what they "want to do." The job of the Supreme Court is not to make their own law but to interpret it. Maybe the Supreme Court is becoming to powerful? Doing "what they want."
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