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Appeals Court Knocks Out "Innocent Infringement"
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "A 3-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit has ruled that a Texas teenager was not entitled to invoke the innocent infringement defense in an RIAA file-sharing case where she had admittedly made unauthorized downloads of all of the 16 song files in question, and had not disputed that she had 'access' to the CD versions of the songs which bore copyright notices. The 11-page decision (PDF) handed down in Maverick Recording v. Harper seems to equate 'access' with the mere fact that CDs on sale in stores had copyright notices, and that she was free to go to such stores. In my opinion, however, that is not the type of access contemplated in the statute, as the reference to 'access' in the statute was intended to obviate the 'innocence' defense where the copy reproduced bore a copyright notice. The court also held that the 'making available' issue was irrelevant to the appeal, and that the constitutional argument as to excessiveness of damages had not been preserved for appeal."
Hi, I'm a teenager in Canada, which is on the planet. I know that downloading music is legal where I am.
Well, when the system is set up so the little guy can never expect to win, while the fat cats have their way... one fella or another may just crack, you know?
Circumcision is child abuse.
In this case the RIAA didn't bother pursuing the "uploading" angle. Instead it asked for $750 per song, the minimum damages for non-innocent DOWNLOADING.
(Harper said it should just be $200 per song, the minimum damages for INNOCENT downloading, on the grounds that she was too young and naive to know that her downloads were illegal. But the court ruled that ignorance of copyright law is not a defense in this case.)
1) certainly applies, and here in the UK more-so. Why? Well here it is illigal to bypass copy protection or DRM of any kind regardless of the purpose. In the US I believe you are allowed to rip DVDs or CDs for personal use (i.e. to transfer them to your portable media player or whatever) under fair use laws. However, in the UK it is technically illigal to do even for that reason. I think it is technically legal to download tracks etc as long as you own the CD, providing it is equal or lower quality (an MP3 almost certainly is) as YOU havn't bypassed the protection. Oh well at least when people get sued for that kind of thing here they get somewhat more reasonable charges (in the thousands maybe, rather than hundreds of thousands/millions).
NewYorkLawyer characterized this decision as one about "access" (i.e. the argument that the defendant would have had *access* to other CDs with their copyright notices and so should have known that the same notices would have applied to downloaded music). But the decision clearly states [page 9], "Rather than contest the fact of "access", Harper contended only that she was too young and naive to understand that the copyrights on published music applied to downloaded music." Thus, the issue of "access" was NOT AT STAKE. It was not contested. The decision was made purely on whether Harper's ignorance of copyright law counts as a valid defense. And the court ruled clearly that ignorance of copyright law is not a valid defense. (If it were, then someone would be able to violate e.g. GPL merely by persuading the court that they didn't know how copyright worked.)
1. The name is "NewYorkCountryLawyer".
2. Your characterization of my summary as "dishonest" was quite dishonest on your part.
3. The decision was based on access; it was because of their conclusion on "access" that her lack of knowledge, etc., became irrelevant. Had she not had access, it would have been quite relevant.
4. I found the discussion of "access" vague, and for that reason used the term "seems". I wasn't sure exactly what they were saying. From their decision it seems that they had established that the copies were downloaded from copies that bore no copyright notice. So it would seem that the record supported the lower court's finding that there was no "access", and that they were defining access differently.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
on the published phonorecord or phonorecords to which a defendant in a copyright infringement suit had access
It doesn't refer to the fact that somewhere else in the world, there is a copy lying around somewhere which does have a copyright notice. It refers to the fact that the specific phonorecord being copied has a notice. The statute rationally provides that if you're copying something with a copyright notice on it, you lose the "innocence" defense. The undisputed facts in this case were to the contrary. It was undisputed by anyone, according to the Court, that these copies were made from mp3 files in a filesharing community which did not bear a copyright notice. Accordingly, the lower court was right, and the appeals court wrong, on this point.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful