RIAA Face Truth - Shared Folders Do Not Equal Copyright Infringement

[GhostShip]

A victory for common sense 

http://www.news.com/8301-13578_3-9908353-38.html

A federal judge in New York has dealt the Recording Industry Association of America a setback in its thousands of lawsuits over piracy on peer-to-peer networks.
In a widely anticipated decision, U.S. District Judge Kenneth Karas ruled Monday to reject the RIAA's claim that a Kazaa user who merely "made available" copyrighted music necessarily violated the law. Rather, he said, the RIAA would have to demonstrate that unlawful copying actually took place.

A few characteristics make this case unusual. First, New York federal judges are viewed as well-versed in copyright law, so Karas' decision is likely to be influential. Second, an unusually large number of outside groups filed briefs, including the U.S. Internet Industry Association, the Motion Picture Association of America, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Computer and Communications Industry Association, meaning the court benefited from a range of views and increasing the importance of this week's decision

Lets hope this decision is able to filter through in other cases where the jury where mislead on this exact point of the law, I can see 2 cases alreadyunder appeal , lets hope the Jammie Thomas case benifits from this clarification of the fact you must have actually shared copyrighted material with another person to be infringing the right of copy, to say otherwise brings the law into dispute with common sense.

[GhostShip]

Another Judge on a similar case has agreed that having a shared shared folder containing copyrighted material alone cannot make you liable for copyright infringement.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080403-judge-kills-riaa-subpoena-making-available-not-infringement.html

Like the Barker decision, the EFF submitted an amicus curiae brief in London-Sire v. Does 1-4 raising many of the same arguments that it had in Elektra v. Barker and Atlantic v. Howell. The EFF argued that simply making music available on a P2P network did not rise to the level of copyright infringement and that the RIAA needed to demonstrate that someone other than its authorized agent, MediaSentry, downloaded the file. Judge Nancy Gertner agreed.

"Merely because the defendant has 'completed all the steps necessary for distribution' does not necessarily mean that a distribution has actually occurred," wrote Gertner in her order. "As noted above, merely exposing music files to the Internet is not copyright infringement."

Another issue addressed in the judge's ruling was how far a university should be required to go in order to identify suspected infringers for the RIAA. She notes that IP addresses cannot always be traced to a particular individual with certainty and says that Boston University's coughing up a "long list of possible infringers" would in effect greenlight an RIAA fishing expedition.

It has always seemed strange to me that a court would ever rule that a "right of copy" can possibly have been broken without a single copy changing hands, this new case of course is yet another victory for common sense.