Judge — "Making Available" Is Stealing Music

JonathanF writes "If you were hoping judges would see reason and realize that just using a program that could violate copyright law is about as illegal as leaving your back door unlocked, think again. An Arizona district judge has ruled that a couple who hosted files in KaZaA is liable for over $40K in damages just because they 'made available' songs that could have been pirated by someone, somewhere. There's legal precedent, but how long do we have before the BitTorrent crew is sued?" The New York case testing the same theory is still pending.

Comments

Bizarre...

[RazorDaze]

The files weren't transfered, but they were available, and that's supposed to be the same as distributing?

Is that like being too fugly to get laid, getting busted for prostitution?

Re:Geek Speak Criminal Definition

[Beardo the Bearded]

Law is even weirder than that.

Right now I'm wearing a red shirt.

Let's say I murdered someone tonight and all the witnesses thought I was wearing a blue shirt. If I was convicted, then my shirt is now blue from a legal standpoint. This is despite the fact that is is really a red shirt. Legally, it's blue. Logic and sanity are not necessarily used when determining the finer points of the law.

This is the same shirt I was wearing when I asked my law professor about this question. (I might have been wearing the blue one. It was the one mandatory law class, three years ago.)

What this means is that if you are convicted of using BitTorrent to transfer mp3s over your modems, then the protocol is a program, the T1 is a modem, and you're doing more time than a bank robber.

IANAL. YMMV. CYLDFD. WDTAM?

Back in my day...

[kn0tw0rk]

... we were lucky to have used toilet paper to hold over the raised hiroglyphics to take rubbings of with the bloody stumps of our fingers, and we counted ourselves lucky to be edumacated.