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New Yorkers for FairUse a non-profit advocacy organization incorporated in New York. New Yorkers for Fair Use defends the right of private ownership of computers, and the rights of free speech and free association, especially in new forms made possible by the Internet.
Contrary to a clear line of cases extending back to the decision in White-Smith Music Publishing Co. v. Apollo Co., 209U.S. 1 (1908), petitioners continue to argue in this Court that manufacturers and providers of new technologies of distribution are secondarily liable for infringing uses of that technology of which they are unaware and over which they have no control. Petitioners go farther, and argue that even widespread, substantial non-infringing uses of the new technology do not insulate its manufacturers from li-ability for others’ acts. All of this is law that petitioners made up: they have no statutory bases for their claims,and are arguing here, as they argued below, that they don’t need any. As though this degree of overreaching were insufficient evidence of their mettle, petitioners go on to identify as the technical features of respondents’ computer networking software that establish their entitlement to relief those features that are shared by the whole recent generation of Internet protocols, embodying the future of network design. In the teeth of this Court’s clear statements extending back almost a century, without the slightest statutory justification, petitioners claimed below that they had a right to veto the technological design that organizes the majority of contemporary traffic on the global Internet. Not surprisingly, they lost, and now resume their blustering before this Court. In referring to this as a very important case, petitioners characteristically mistake self-importance for the real thing
