Your friend might be referring to the NYT's article http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/28/te...8grokster.html that interviewed LimeWire's Mark Gorton about the US Supreme Court hearings related to file sharing networks.

He pointed out that since LimeWire is released as free open source software through limewire.org, the software and protocol cannot be stopped.

There are other ongoing filesharing lawsuits in the UK, Canada and around the world. For example, Google news has over 600 entries for the SCOTUS Grokster/MGM hearings, so I'm not sure where your friend got his "idea."