MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd.
United States Supreme Court case
MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., 545 U.S. 913 (2005), is a United States Supreme Court decision in which the Court ruled unanimously that the defendants, peer-to-peer file sharing companies Grokster and Streamcast (maker of Morpheus), could be held liable for inducing copyright infringement by users of their file sharing software. The plaintiffs were a consortium of 28 entertainment companies, led by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios.
Background
Entertainment industry lawsuits against new technologies that enable the copying of copyrighted content date back to the 1980s, when the movie industry sought court injunctions against the sale and use of VCRs. In Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios in 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a technology manufacturer cannot be held liable for its users' copyright infringement if widespread unauthorized copying is unlikely, and if the technology enables significant non-infringing uses as well.
The advent of file sharing via the Internet in the late 1990s, and its enabling of easy and more widespread copying of copyrighted materials, inspired new arguments from the entertainment industry because copying technology had progressed since the 1980s. The Sony precedent was partially modified by the Ninth Circuit in A&M Records v.
“MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd.” enters the record as united States Supreme Court case. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Studios, Grokster and United can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd.” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Studios, Grokster and United provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6715752. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2005 and 1984.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd.” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.