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

Re:Bittorrent is not a p2p file sharing program.

[AKAImBatman]

Actually, it will. The judgement is directly against people sharing files with an obvious intent to infringe on copyright. How that compares to the legality of a download acceleration service (BitTorrent) is beyond me. Even the BitTorrent search engine doesn't make the files directly available. It simply links to torrent files that describe the network for downloading the file. They also (as I understand) yank illegal torrents from the search on request. So I don't really see the parallel that the submitter is trying to make.

copyright infringers get sued != BitTorrent is an illegal technology