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:Let them Fry!

[GISGEOLOGYGEEK]

Actually no, that won't happen ... and you don't have to go way back to the savings and loan scam for an example. Go back a week or two to the sub prime mortgage scam. Or check back every 5 years for whatever banking scam your government lets your banks screw you with that has suddenly blown up. None of them apply here.

If the music industry collapses ... the economy will keep going with just a little bump.

When your pathetic american banking scams collapse every 5 years or so, your government has to jump in and bail them out or risk a quick destruction of your economy ... as opposed to the slow destruction you're currently going through thanks to Bush's many years of budget deficits and thanks to Bush being suckered into letting Osama bleed your economy to dust with military expenditures to destroy you the way he destroyed the USSR. But that's another story.

Re:He who has the gold rules

[bky1701]

Except for the fact that you'll get sued if you become too popular doing that. With the majority of music in existence now belonging to the RIAA in some way, I'd be easy for them to argue you violated their "copyright". I read a few stories about this already, and there isn't even any treat to them now.