Comments on: Supreme Court mulls file-swap 'pushers'

Middle-ground ruling in P2P case could focus on companies that actively encouraged copyright infringement.

Inducement rule makes sense

Pseudephedrine antihistamines do a lot of good, but you can use the product to make illegal methamphetamine. You wouldn't sanction the Sudafed folks for making a pseudephedrine product, but you would for using a sales pitch that involved instructions for using the product to make meth. Same deal here. It's the come-on that's improper, not the technology.

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Unfortunitly things are rarely so cut and dry. Your example is rather explicit what about more subtle cases? I've been using archive.org's "way back machine" to look at older versions of Groksters site and I can't find anything that appears to be using infringing material as lure or an attempt to get people to infringe. That is unless the mere mention of music and/or software is sufficent to constitute inducement. Would telling someone how to share an mp3, avi, or zip file etc be inducement? Evenone of those formats can be used to trade copyrighted material along with material that legal to share.

Instructions

The problem with that argument though, is that most (but not all) of the p2p programs are careful with their instructions. I've see a number over the last few years and each one of them were very vague on the type of file downloaded.
For example, you'll see in their instructions "to download a file, click blah blah blah..."
you'll never see anything saying "if you want to steal movies click here, if you want to steal games or music, click here."
Granted there are some exceptions to the rule, but those companies are stupid and deserve to be shutdown.