Kazaa And Exportation of U.S. Copyright Laws

Mr. Vidster writes "Interesting article in the NYTimes about the potential issues the U.S. justice system must face when dealing with Sharman Networks and KaZaA. Apparently Sharman and KaZaA have servers in Denmark, source code in Estonia, and the developers live in the Netherlands. How far does the long arm of US copyright law reach?"

Comments

As far as it wants to.

[drhairston]

Jon Johansen can answer that question for you, and he is only a teengager.

Re:As far as it wants to.

[halftrack]

There are better examples, Jon Johansen is being prosecuted according to norwegian law. Certain US criminal cases come to mind (like Skylarov.) And some people's (IIRC just like Alan Cox') fear of traveling to the US.

Re:As far as it wants to.

[Jeppe Salvesen]

Being a Norwegian, I must say that I suspect the Johansen prosecution is all about appeasing the USA. We are allied with the USA, and the USA is an important trade partner as well as defence partner.

If we did not attempt to prosecute Jon Johansen, it would look like we did not care about the views of the USA. Rather, we will try him in a Court of Law using Norwegian Law. Most domestic IT law experts expects Johansen to win. It will be trying for the poor kid, but he will go loose and the USA will be moderately satisfied we at least tried.

That being said, I believe the WTO agreements are the papers to look for when researching the scope of Intellectual Property law.

Re:As far as it wants to.

[thomas.galvin]

What I also find hilarious about the copyright argument... The RIAA says music sales are down due to d/l's of mp3's and the various other formats of music; however, I guess our current state of the economy would have nothing to do with the decrease in sales? I wonder if they compared other times of poor economy with their sales trends if they would be comparable to the downside trend they have been noticing.

I wonder if they compared their situation to other times providers of non-esentiall goods were guilty of price fixing.

Re:As far as it wants to.

[Eppie]

Jursidiction is really not that complicated here. If you avail yourself of the benefits of doing business in America, then you are subject to the laws of America. Everybody likes to pretend these are novel issues, but American courts don't find them to be that difficult.

What follows is a repost of my two-secondprimer on personal jurisdiction on the internet:

American civil procedure provides for jurisdiction over foreign companies that do business in America. The theory is that if you come to America and avail yourself of our markets, resources, society, labor, and laws, you are bound to obey our laws. This does not mean that you can be sued in New York if you offer goods for sale in China and some American happens to buy them while on vacation in Beijing. It does mean, though, that if you knowingly advertise in America, ship goods to America, or provide services to American clients, you can be sued in America for violating American law.

On the Internet, this analysis is a little complicated because websites are accessed internationally, and it is difficult to detect what country people are really browsing from. Still, efforts can be made to exclude certain jurisdictions. For example, Lindows.com [lindows.com] used to have a message [google.com] on their website that refusing to do business in Washington state. This is because they were trying to avoid being dragged into court by MSFT in Washington state.

There is plenty of caselaw on this emerging area of law:

• A Blue Note jazz club in Missouri was sued by the Blue Note jazz club in New York. A NY court held that the Missouri club's website, though viewable from NY, did not create jurisdiction in NY because the club was a strictly local Missouri operation. (Bensuan Rest. Corp. v. King, 126 F.3d 25)
• Likewise, Cybersell of Arizona sued Cybersell of Florida for trademark infringement and was denied jurisdiction because Cybersell of Florida was not really offering its services to Arizonans. (Cybersell, Inc. v. Cybersell, Inc., 130 F.3d 414)
• OTOH, Zippo (the company that makes lighters) sued Zippo.com (a company that provided fast news updates) in Pennsylvania. Since Zippo offered its news service to netizens across the land, including PA, they were adjuged to be doing business in PA and thus were amenable to suit.

As the cases make clear, there is a sliding scale that stretches from (1) passive website relating to local activities to (2) interactive website offering services to anybody across the land. Elcomsoft sounds a lot more like Zippo than it does the Blue Note jazz club in Missouri. If they are offering their services to Americans and offering downloads to Americans, they have to expect that they might be sued by Americans in America.

Re:As far as it wants to.

[tuxlove]

US Copyright law extends as far as the US has influence in the world.

This has nothing to do with US copyright law and everything to do with international copyright law. I do not defend the RIAA, but feel obliged to note that copyright law is extended *both* directions through international treaty. IANAL, but I at least understand that US copyrights are honored elsewhere, and foreign copyrights are honored in the US. At least in theory, and excluding "pirate" countries and countries without at least a modicum of stability.

It's truly obnoxious the way the RIAA chooses to defend its copyrights. But the implication that the US is somehow overstepping its bounds by going after pirates outside its borders is ludicrous. These "foreign" countries have *agreed* to protect the copyrights of US entities, just as the US has agreed to protect theirs. It's the RIAA's heavy handed tactics that are the problem, not their belief that they have the right to protect their copyrighted works.

What's really in question is the legal interpretation of copyrights outside the US with regard to file sharing. To that end, the US can only work within the confines of the legal systems of the countries in question. They may display an excess of testosterone when dealing with the legal systems of these countries, but in the end the say is not that of the US legal system. The DMCA does not apply because it is not recognized internationally.

Re:As far as it wants to.

[RogerWilco]

Actually most of the world's oil (like 50%) is in Saudi-Arabia, that's why it still get's away with being a despotic monarcy. Because everyone, the USA foremost wants to be friends with the saudi royal family.
This in turn creates many unhappy saudi have-not's, ready to do terrible deeds to fight those who keep the saudi royal family in power. I mean the 9-11 terrorists here.

The USA only has some sizable reserves in alaska, most other oil fields have almost been sucked dry, like texas. A clear sign when a field is almost exhausted is that these "nodding machines"
(I don't know the english name) to get out oil, these is no pressure in the field anymore.
This is the case in al great american oil fields,
because they were developed a long time ago.

totals for the USA and others on
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/iea/table81.html
or google some

have fun!

Berne Convention

[An El Haqq]

Here, read the

Berne Convention.

Re:Damn,

[(trb001)]

Because of the nature of KaZaA, I believe that it's impossible to shut down foreign servers. I'm not overly familiar with how KaZaA works, but how do you shut down something that, in theory, can run on any computer, any port,without making calls to a centralized server, doesn't track transmitted files and can use encrypted communications? That final part invalidates ip-sniffing, and the random ports restricts your port blocking.

Finally, how do you prosecute someone if you don't know where they are? Eventually (as it sounds like is somewhat the case with KaZaA) someone will write a system like this and then not release their names. Internal version information is enough to keep track of releases and by the time something has been distributed enough to know it's a pest, it's been distributed enough to become a persistant problem.

--trb

Xerox stock plummets after copyright legal cases.

[thebitninja]

As the court room drama around file copying programs continues, photocopier companies relocate to foreign lands to try and protect themselves from copyright infringment. Pen companies worry about the uses to which their products may be put and all photography companies temporarily suspend trading, worried that users may photograph copy protected items. Once the floodgates have been pried open even a crack it's all on!

wired

[asv108]

Wired had an article about KaZaA's globalization strategy a few weeks ago.

Re:Damn,

[Frobnicator]

That's the entire problem with regulation attempts on the Internet. Physical location is unimportant. Except for issues that are generally considered bad by the global population, regulation is a messy issue.

I've heard it said that almost all the knowledge of the world is available over the Internet, and most of what isn't can be purchased or ordered through the Internet. If so much is available then the regulation of them are pretty insignificant. Examples from my own viewpoint:

• porn: Global consensus seems to be that it's bad for kids, but adults can choose. The regulation problem is finding a global age when the choice is acceptable. 21? 18? 16? 14? Regulation seems to be within a country or within friendly countries.
• kiddie-porn: Global consensus seems to be that taking porn pictures of kids will basically ruin their life, so no real complaints when any country crosses international boundaries. Some nations object until their pockets are properly lined with cash.
• Shipping Drugs, Alchohol & Tobacco: Global consensus seems to vary based on location and national laws. It seems that trade by major groups is acceptable (since they follow laws and are licensed, pay tarrifs, etc) but minor groups are being attacked -- mainly because of tarrifs and not other laws. Regulation seems to be either "friendly companies that pay taxes and basically don't traffic in narcotics" or criminals who bypass the few restrictions in place.
• IP Theft: The only people who really seem to care are the people having their employee's ideas made available. The individuals who assert their IP rights seem to love the extra exposure, and don't mind being sent around the world as long as their name stays attached.
• Music & Movies: You don't see India asserting this kind of laws, even though they produce most of the world's feature-length films. That seems to be a US-Only issue, more specific, an issue only with the mega-corps associated with RIAA and MPAA. So when these groups try to get the US to put P2P on the same moral level as kiddie-porn, there are pretty bad reactions.

So from my view, the only people who want a hand in regulation on the Internet are the governments who are afriad of not getting taxes, and mega-corps who can't sell overpriced goods. There was an interesting piece on PBS some time ago that showed who the megacorps were -- note that these companies are the major entities in the MPAA and RIAA.

frob.

Re:grrr

[Elwood P Dowd]

Um, it's pretty straightforward.

The courts in the Netherlands has said that distributing Kazaa is not illegal. That's where the servers are.

The court in LA could say it's illegal for those servers to do what they're doing. They may decide that they have jurisdiction because they are communicating with Americans. Punishable by the DMCA, whatever.

When the folks from Sharman Networks next fly to the US, federal agents could be waiting for them. It'll be up to Holland to decide if extradition treaties apply.

The jurisdictional problem would be the same if some folks in Holland built a bomb-mailer, and had some Danes set it up for them. The bomb-mailer then sent mail bombs to the US and killed Jack Valenti. The only difference is that those actions are much more clearly illegal. This copyright issue is more vague. It's a matter of degrees.

We can decide if it's illegal. It involves American people on American soil. We can only pressure other countries to extradite. They might want us to extradite their criminals at some point in the future.

Don't get me wrong, I do not feel that Sharman/the developers should get messed with. But this is how international law has always worked, and will always work. Furrinners might get upset that the US can apply more pressure than other countries. I'm curious what they might suggest we do to eliminate that problem. They can't *make* us agree to something that isn't in our best interests, and they shouldn't be able to. That would be a at least as warlike than we've ever been.

Also, you do not make this mistake, but I'd like to bring it up: In my (limited) discussion of US foreign policy with non-US citizens, they'll frequently become angry with me, even when I agree with them. I've been treated like an ignorant cretin by people that were respecting my advice only moments earlier. This came up most often in discussions of the Vietnam War.

I'm anti-war. My dad was a consciencious (sp?) objector, and would have served prison time rather than kill Vietnamese. It seems like in discussions like this, many people are happy to return to nationalism and assume that members of other countries are necesarily idiots. Again, these are people that both knew and liked me.

Iduno. I'm moving to Golden Rule when they build it.

Re:when you say "non" you start having accidents

[DrSkwid]

French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said the probe "will find out exactly what happened" and stressed that "no possibility is ruled out".

That includes allied coercion.

It wouldn't be the first time. I don't know why you sound surprised. The Americans are a govt. that imported and sold cocaine to finance covert arms purchases. Remember?