RIAA "Making Available" Theory Rejected

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In a 25-page decision (PDF) which has been awaited for two years in Elektra v. Barker, Judge Kenneth M. Karas has rejected the RIAA's 'making available' theory and its 'authorization' theory, but sustained the sufficiency of the complaint's allegations of 'distribution' and 'downloading,' and also gave the RIAA 30 days to cure the defects in its complaint by filing a new complaint. The judge left it open for the RIAA to allege that defendant made an 'offer to distribute,' and that the offer was for "'the purpose of further distribution,' which, the judge held, would be actionable."

Comments

Re:Haha this is pretty much a win

[calebt3]

What is bittorrent for, except "further distribution"? And by announcing yourself to the tracker, your system is telling it what pieces of the file you have to distribute.

Re:Haha this is pretty much a win

[Todd Knarr]

That depends. That's the default behavior unless you go and deliberately modify the client's settings. So if I go to a tracker to get say a Linux distribution, treating a BitTorrent client like a fancy FTP program purely for download, I'm going to offer up chunks of what I'm downloading unless I'm technically savvy enough to know this is happening and change the default behavior. If I'm not technically savvy, I probably won't even realize this is happening. And there's the trick of it: if I put something down on a table in my front yard while I go inside and get a drink, not realizing someone will come along and take it, have I made an offer to that someone to distribute what I've left laying there?

Re:Haha this is pretty much a win

[Atlantis-Rising]

I find it perhaps ironic that this is what you're saying, when I was arguing very similarly in another thread- unsecured WAPs, where I argued that the software's authorization was not necessarily the person's authorization.

It seems like Slashdot (if it could be described as one homogeneous entity, of course) believes that to be sufficient authorization to immunize one from liability but this to not be sufficient authorization to incur it, despite the scenarios being very similar.

  Any ideas why?

Re:Haha this is pretty much a win

[Ucklak]

First of all, all these **AA vs. Common Grandma are all about a P2P that uses complete files like Kazaa, Napster (in the old days), Morpheus, etc...
I've never heard anything about the RIAA or MPAA going after a user using a torrent client. Going after a tracker is a different thing.
Seeding would be analogous to a P2P of the former.
Being a client or leeching is no more distributing content than sending emails to a friend or coworkers using normal language and calling that copyright infringement on normal language in published books.