The actual certiorari order
You can read the MGM v. Grokster certiorari order in the Supreme Court's order list for Friday, December 10. It's only one sentence, but what a sentence.
So, for the first time, an EFF case is going to the Supreme Court. I could also say that, for the first time, a case I've worked on is going to the Supreme Court.
Some people asked me what "certiorari" means. It is the passive infinitive of the Latin verb certioro, certiorare. (I had wrongly believed that the verb was deponent until I looked it up in Lewis and Short just now.) Certioro means "to inform, apprise, show", according to Lewis and Short, which means that "certiorari" means "to be informed, to be apprised, to have shown to one". Some people suggest it means "to learn more", which seems like a reasonable paraphrase.
Although there are many kinds of writs that the U.S. Supreme Court can issue, an appeal that is not "as of right" (that is, an appeal that the Court has discretion to decide whether to accept) is now normally taken by asking the Court to issue a writ of certiorari. (There are infrequent appeals as of right to the Supreme Court; one example is when Congress specifically creates an expedited review process for a law such as the Communications Decency Act or the Children's Internet Protection Act. This is why Supreme Court decisions about those laws show "On Appeal from" some lower court in the caption, instead of the much more typical "On Writ of Certiorari to" some lower court. In the past, for reasons I don't understand, it was much more common to see "On Writ of Error" in discretionary reviews.)
Taking "certiorari" as "to learn more", asking the Court for a writ of certiorari means asking the Court to choose to learn more about a particular case. And so, when the Court chooses to hear a discretionary appeal, it will issue a writ of certiorari to the lower court that originally made the decision under review. That writ essentially asks the lower court to send the Supreme Court more information about the history of the case and the decision, so that the Court may use that information to decide whether or not the lower court got it right. If the Supreme Court denies an appeal -- denies certiorari -- it is effectively saying that it does not care to learn more about that particular case at that time.
So granting certiorari in MGM v. Grokster essentially means that the Supreme Court is curious about that case and wants to learn more about it. By convention, that curiosity extends to deciding whether the lower court (in this case, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals) decided the case correctly. In very unusual situations, the Supreme Court does not follow that convention; it begins to learn more about a case and then decides the case is not actually interesting or important enough. In that case, the writ of certiorari will be dismissed and the Supreme Court will not decide the case after all. You can find examples of this by doing a Google search for the magic phrase "the writ of certiorari is dismissed as improvidently granted". Sometimes the Court will say why certiorari was improvidently granted, and other times it's a complete mystery. One case where the writ of certiorari was dismissed late in the game (after argument) was Kasky v. Nike, the case about whether Nike could be prosecuted for false advertising after it made claims that its labor practices were good when apparently they were actually bad.
Now maybe someone is curious about what a deponent verb is. A deponent verb is a verb that is "passive in form, but active in meaning"; etymologically, it has "dropped" or "lost" or "given up" its active forms. This probably doesn't make any sense for people who don't know an inflected language. Latin has a number of verbs like this, and until today, I had wrongly thought that "certiorari" was one of them.
By the way, "certioro" is closely related to "certus", which is related to the English word "certain", or, maybe more usefully, "ascertain". It might be based to say that the Supreme Court chooses what kinds of things it is going to ascertain.
