A Better Introduction to Grokster - A Modern Day Sony Betamax Case In this week’s installation of The Grokster Chronicles, I will explain how the Grokster case is really just a modern day revisiting of the principles of the historical Betamax case. The “Betamax” case refers to Universal vs. Sony, in which the Supreme Court decided that a company was not liable for creating a technology that some customers may use for copyright infringing purposes, so long as the technology is capable of substantial non-infringing uses. Said another way, the court decided that, when a technology has many uses, the public cannot be denied the lawful uses just because some (or many or most) may use the product to infringe copyrights. Less