Misinformation about file-sharing, RIAA lawsuits, and the Grokster decision is perpetrated all the time by the mainstream media, which often fails to get a grip on the details. Innocent-seeming sentences can deliver a whopping dose of wrong information which then gets spread virally. Wednesday, a Reuters piece about the RIAA sending cease-and-desist letters to file-sharing companies contained a reference to "the landmark ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in June that held anyone who distributes a device used to infringe copyright is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by others." That would be an astounding ruling, and, of course, the Supreme Court issued an entirely different decision that was more abut the intention to infringe, and the marketing of that intention. Furthermore, the Court did not get into liability at all; it merely sent a pending case back to a lower court.

Yesterday, the same Reuters piece was syndicated in CNET, and the sentence had been changed to this: "...the landmark ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in June that held anyone who distributes a device meant to be used for copyright infringement is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by others." That "meant to be used" makes all the difference, though the liability part is still an overstatement.