The Yale Free Press

The Supremes Didn’t Grok It

Thankfully, this summer the Supreme Court did not make it substantially harder to download Family Guy half-dressed at 3:00 in the morning. On the surface, the “slam-dunk” 9-0 ruling in MGM v. Grokster would seem a resounding condemnation of file-trading software as a technology “inducing” illegal activity. The Supreme Court changed little from the 21-year-old VCR recording case Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, in which a lawful technology must also be “capable of substantial noninfringing use,” even if the actual use is overwhelmingly illegal.

In MGM, though, liability is based on “inducement of infringement,” meaning that a file-sharing company could be held accountable for the illegal use of its products if it engages in “the clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement.”

This is a stricter standard than Sony originally imposed, but it still leaves the media companies stuck with proving intent on the part of the software firms. Intent-based standards are notoriously difficult to prove—though that does not mean the media and content companies will not try it.

It does mean that file-sharing firms receive a temporary reprieve from legislative assault—not bad for a “unanimous” negative ruling. Companies like Grokster will probably try hard to broadcast their ignorance of illegal downloading with plenty of precautionary warnings and clauses in the software, but those are just a few more windows to click through before finding a copy of Sin City that was not filmed in the movie theater.

Coming Soon to Your Roommate’s Bureau Drawer

Researchers at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, reported in late August that an experimental drug called CX717 temporarily improved performance and reversed the effects of sleep deprivation in the brains of monkeys. The promise of a drug capable of reversing the temporary brain impairments associated with sleeplessness needs no elaboration in comparison to forcing down a sixteen-ounce thermos of Fair Trade City Roast from Commons.

The drug works to increase the action of the neurotransmitter glutamate, and it boosted the scores of fully alert, well-rested monkeys in a cognitive test involving picking images flashed on a computer screen. After keeping the monkeys up for thirty to thirty-six hours (the equivalent of keeping humans awake for three days), the low scores caused by sleep deprivation were also brought back up to normal by a dose of CX717.

Now that it has shown some effectiveness in sleep-deprived humans as well, CX717 is moving into more advanced stages of testing. Whether it will take a seat alongside Ritalin, Ambien, and Adderall in the college pharmocopoeia will not be known for a few more years.