eBay Beats DMCA

pgrote writes "eBay won a court battle that brought to light a key provision of the DCMA. The judge says, "Although it may facilitate the sale of pirated material, "eBay does not have the right and ability to control such activity," a standard required by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the judge wrote." So does that mean that the P2P file trading programs are legal since the pirating occurs off the sites? This is could be a very important precedent. " In talking to some lawyer friends, their perspective on part of the Napster case was that by being very difficult in the beginning, Napster almost doomed itself. But, as always, IANAL ^? .

Comments

Next Step

[Fat Casper]

Now what we need is for the Bush administration to order the Justice Department not to enforce the DMCA. The're already dropping useful judgements, maybe now they can do something useful themselves.

We need more court cases like this.

[mblase]

EBay asked Hendrickson to submit a sworn, written statement detailing his claim through its Verified Rights Owner Program, which lets copyright holders request that eBay remove an infringing item. Hendrickson refused, saying his general complaints should have been good enough.

I love that part. EBay suggested he go through their standard procedure for filing copyright complaints, which (I believe) has worked for others in the past. He refused, snobbily. He brought a legal case, and he lost.

Good for him. If he'd done things the acceptable way instead of trying to let lawyers solve his problem, he'd probably have the problem solved already. America needs more lessons like this.

eBay won because

[Omnifarious]

eBay won because they were big, established, and profitable. They also had clear non-infringing uses of their service established.

Napster was percieved as an upstart pirate of a company, and that's why they lost.

I don't think it has a great deal to do with the letter of the law here, but how the companies were percieved by the respective judges.