The Supreme Court has not yet decided whether to hear the appeal, which had been widely expected.
The move comes in response to an August decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to throw out a copyright case brought by the industry against Streamcast Networks Inc., the company behind the Morpheus file-sharing software, and Grokster Ltd, on the grounds that, while the companies provide the software used by file-sharers to swap illegally copied digital files, the software can also be used for legitimate purposes.
In the opinion, written by Judge Sidney R Thomas, there was much reference to a 1980s decision on Sony's Betamax video recorder, which, at the time, had been accused of infringing TV and movie studios' copyrights. Sony won that case because the machine had significant non-infringing uses.
On this occasion, said the judge, "The technology has numerous other uses, significantly reducing the distribution costs of public domain and permissively shared art and speech, as well as reducing the centralised control of that distribution."
The Court was also hesitant to extend the scope of copyright law to cope with the new technologies, as the entertainment industry was urging.
In its filing on Friday, the industry urged the Supreme Court to look again at the ruling. As the petition, filed jointly by major players in the music and film industries, says, "This is one of the most important copyright cases ever to reach this Court. Resolution of the question presented here will largely determine the value, indeed the very significance, of copyright in the digital era."
"The entertainment industry petition is a frontal attack on the Betamax doctrine and threatens innovators of every stripe," said Fred von Lohmann, senior lawyer with rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who successfully argued the case before the Ninth Circuit.
The entertainment industry's petition was filed just one day after Senator Orin Hatch announced that the Senate was not ready to adopt his Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act (formerly known as the INDUCE Act), which would make anyone who "intentionally induces any violation" of US copyright law liable for that violation.
He suggested that Congress would return to the issue next year.
"The entertainment industry appears to think that it can treat the Supreme Court and Congress interchangeably in pushing for their rewrite of copyright law," said von Lohmann. "But it's Congress that writes the Copyright Act, not the courts. The Supreme Court will not be eager to end-run Congress on this complex legislative issue."