RIIA Judgment Overturned

Soccer Mom · Sep 25, 2008

I thought this was interesting. Simply "making available" isn't enough for a copyright infringement suit. There must be actual dissemination.

Jammie Thomas is off the hook—at least for the time being. Judge Michael J. Davis has overturned a federal jury's copyright infringement verdict and award of $222,000 in damages to the RIAA. The verdict was handed down last October after a three-day trial and a few hours of deliberations.
Judge Davis determined that he gave the jury an erroneous instruction on the question of whether making a file available for download over a P2P network violated the record labels' distribution right under the Copyright Act. The original jury instructions said that it wasn't, but, after a hearing outside of the presence of the jury, Judge Davis amended the instruction to follow the RIAA's theory that making a file available equals infringement.

Story here.

PDF of the decision here.

mscelina · Sep 25, 2008

Really? Wow. So in other words (applying this to writers specifically) someone can take a copy of your book and make it available on their P2P (like Limewire) for free (as in posts the whole darn thing page by page as opposed to a download) and that's NOT copyright infringement?

In that case, then pre-release leaks wouldn't be copyright infringement either.

Bubastes · Sep 25, 2008

I did a quick skim of the opinion. Veddy interesting. At least the judge pretty much admitted that he needs help from Congress to clarify the law on the distribution issue when it comes to P2P networks. I got the sense that Judge Davis wanted the decision to go the other way, but was bound by existing case law requiring dissemination (under different fact patterns, of course) for infringement. It will be interesting to see how the new trial plays out.

RIIA Judgment Overturned

Soccer Mom

Crypto-fascist

mscelina

Teh doommobile, drivin' rite by you

Bubastes

bananaed