U.S. Supreme Court justices struggled in a lively debate with how to balance the competing interests of the entertainment industry and developers of file-sharing technology. Some justices sharply questioned whether it was fair to hold inventors of a distribution technology liable for copyright infringement, while others suggested that it was wrong for a business to thrive on illegal copying. In the case, "MGM Studios Inc. vs. Grokster Ltd.", movie and recording companies hope to put an end to the swapping of songs and videos online by holding the producers of peer-to-peer file-sharing software responsible for the copyright violations of users. The suit is one of the most significant copyright cases to come before the Supreme Court since 1984, when the justices ruled on the legality of the Betamax videocassette recorder. In legal briefs filed in support of Grokster, scholars and technology experts asked the court to judge file-sharing software using the same standard it applied to the VCR. They argued that peer-to-peer networks, like the VCR, were often used for perfectly legal purposes. In a host of documents filed with the court, professors offered examples of how peer-to-peer technology advances scholarship. Many of the professors are attracted to the decentralized nature of peer-to-peer systems because their institutions cannot afford to maintain a central server or add bandwidth capacity needed to move some larger files in traditional ways. Thus, law professors filed five different briefs in support of Grokster. The briefs argue variously that peer-to-peer networks promote free speech, do not harm music and movie-ticket sales, encourage technological innovation, and should be regulated by Congress, not the courts.