"The first people who were playing with the technology TimeTrax is based on weren't people that I would have over for dinner with the family," said Frutkin, who does not condone stealing. "But that's the way things happen."
Major technology companies, including Microsoft Corp., Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and America Online Inc., have urged the court to avoid basing its decision on how much a product is used for nefarious purposes. They argue that courts should look at whether Grokster actively encourages and helps users to steal, which would be punishable under existing copyright law.
Elliott Frutkin, chief executive of Time Trax Technologies of Gaithersburg, said that while his product is in line with the law, some users of technology are bound to push legal boundaries.
(Jahi Chikwendiu -- The Washington Post)
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_____Explainer_____
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The Peer-to-Peer Family: BitTorrent allows Internet users to share files at a faster clip than its more traditional peer-to-peer cousins. This graphic shows how it works.
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_____Story Archive_____
 • Disparate Cast Lobbies Court To Restrict File Sharing (The Washington Post, Jan 26, 2005)
• U.S. Asks High Court to Curb File Swapping (The Washington Post, Jan 25, 2005)
• Tech Firms to Seek Legal Protection From Pirating (The Washington Post, Jan 24, 2005)
• High Court To Weigh File Sharing (The Washington Post, Dec 11, 2004)
• Appeals Court Ruling Favors File-Sharing (The Washington Post, Aug 20, 2004)
• File-Swap Sites Not Infringing, Judge Says (The Washington Post, Apr 26, 2003)
_____Case Documents_____
• Archive FindLaw collected briefs, previous rulings, profiles and commentary on one Web page.
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Officials of the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America say that approach would make it too easy for companies to avoid prosecution for acts they tacitly approve but never explicitly encourage.
The Grokster case, they insist, is not about scaring off new inventions. It focuses purely on file-sharing services -- including Kazaa and several others -- whose operations the entertainment companies claim are built to encourage, support and profit from piracy, even if the underlying technology has legal uses.
Firms that do not have illegal file-sharing as their primary business model have nothing to fear, said Fritz Attaway, chief policy counsel for the MPAA.
As an example, Attaway said the MPAA has not sued Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent, instead targeting several operators of Web sites that serve as BitTorrent directories and openly list copyrighted movies.
Cohen said he developed the technology to allow devotees of bands that allow their concerts to be recorded to share copies with other fans. But he is well aware of the misuse by some BitTorrent index sites, whose operators have openly pitched their directories as resources for copyrighted movies.
"That's like putting a big 'shoot me' sign on your forehead," Cohen said of the sites.
Device makers have fended off the entertainment industry before. In a case that set the legal standards that will be reviewed in the Grokster case, the movie industry sued Sony Corp. over its Betamax recorders, arguing that copying television programs violated copyright laws.
In 1984, the Supreme Court ruled that making a copy to view at another time -- or "time-shifting" -- was an acceptable personal use. More broadly, it determined that device makers could not be held responsible for illegal acts of users as long as the product was "merely capable" of substantial uses that were legal.
