Judge Rejects RIAA 'Making Available' Theory

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "A federal judge in Connecticut has rejected the RIAA's 'making available' theory, which is the basis of all of the RIAA's peer to peer file sharing cases. In Atlantic v. Brennan, in a 9-page opinion [PDF], Judge Janet Bond Arterton held that the RIAA needs to prove 'actual distribution of copies', and cannot rely — as it was permitted to do in Capitol v. Thomas — upon the mere fact that there are song files on the defendant's computer and that they were 'available'. This is the same issue that has been the subject of extensive briefing in two contested cases in New York, Elektra v. Barker and Warner v. Cassin. Judge Arterton also held that the defendant had other possible defenses, such as the unconstitutionality of the RIAA's damages theory and possible copyright misuse flowing from the record companies' anticompetitive behavior."

Comments

Re:Smart Judge

[Reziac]

That's actually an interesting question -- how many of us here WOULD vote for Ron Paul?** I'm guessing no more than about half, since there are a fair number of left-wing liberals in the slashdot mix.

**I did, but I'm just one in, uh, a million and change...

Re:What about Obama?

[eh2o]

Normal, intelligent people don't care much about national politics because they know that as individuals they have zero impact on the operations of the broken and corrupt system. That is the *rational* response. The *irrational* response when presented with a non-responsive system is to engage in some sort of behavior that at least devotes more resources to the cause than the situation merits (obsessive stalking of women comes to mind as an example).

In my estimation, people who are very ... talkative ... about their favorite candidate also tend to be at least slightly insane. A good friend of mine who is a libertarian (a lobbyist, actually) and RP supporter (who is only slightly insane, but in a good way for the most part) told me that a significant portion of the people at the local RP meetup were seriously proposing to "take to the streets" (i.e. guns and rioting) if RP wasn't elected president.