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RIAA Throws In Towel On "Making Available" Case
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA has thrown in the towel on one of the leading cases challenging its 'making available' theory, Warner v. Cassin, in which the defendant had moved to dismiss the RIAA's complaint. We have just learned that the RIAA submitted a voluntary notice of dismissal before the judge got to decide the defendant's motion to dismiss the complaint. It will be of interest to see if Ms. Cassin pursues a claim for attorneys' fees in view of recent court rulings that successful copyright defendants are presumptively entitled to an attorneys fee award, even if the dismissal came about from the plaintiffs' having 'thrown in the towel.'"
Copyright "law" is not, for the most part, about whether a given specific action is illegal or illegal. Rather, every action must be considered in terms of a number of factors, including its nature, scope, intent, use, and so on. This means, for example, that doing a given action once may be legal in one context may be ok, but in another it would be ruled as infringment. It also means that doing one action may be ok, but doing it 100 times may be ruled as infringment.
No reasonable human being thinks that the mechanism of P2P of sharing chunks of files has anything to do with it whatsoever. So, yes, sharing even one bit may well REASONABLY be infringment if it the action can be viewed as infringing as viewed through a reasonable observation of nature, scope, intent, use, and so forth.
Seriously. Do some reading.
start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
and then, if you have the ability, continue here: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/
seriously, read it.
Let's be clear, since you're trying to twist things around. The statement wasnt whether copying one bit or one note is on its own, copyright inringement. The question was whether, for example, if you placed a given file on a p2p network and, throug the distributed glories of the p2p system, you just happaned to distribute some tiny portion (let's call it one bit, even though of course actual p2p systems work on slightly larger granularities) of a copyrighted work. If this happened, then, yes, of course this could be seen as copyright infringement. It would be provable (through the hash of the file involved) that you were involved in the unlawful redistribution of copyrighted work - that you happened to have only distributed a tiny part of it is nothing more than a technological accident.
To put it another way, it's like you robbed a bank with a gun on a day that due to some weird scheduling and cash movement issue in the bank the bank only had $1. To make a de minimis claim that this is not armed robbery would be absurd.
Mr "attorney" who "concentrated" on IP law - actually do have a read of Title 17. I encourage you to consider the word "any" in 17.501.(a). Any means any.
I did not know that Warner's music was GPL'd. Thanks for the info.
But thanks for pointing out that copyright infringement is not actually stealing. It sounds like one of your crowning achievements from "law school" (though most people would have gotten this from high school freshman civics).