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."

Comments

Not really the point

[legio_noctis]

Whether she was innocently infringing or not isn't really the point because it's fairly obvious that no teenager on the planet who pirates music doesn't know that it's illegal.

The problem is that she's in court for downloading 16 songs. Randomly attacking people who will find it difficult to defend themselves legally isn't the right way to go about reducing piracy.

Re:Not really the point

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's possible for a teenager (or anyone) to not know that downloading music off LimeWire or other systems is not copyright infringement (or worse, 'illegal'), some examples:

1) You download an MP3 of a song that you purchased on CD because you need a digital copy for your portable music player and don't want (or know how) to rip the CD yourself. Copyright infringement? Illegal?
2) Some small artist has a new song that you download. Copyright infringement? Illegal? What if your just mistaken and confused this artist with another small artist that has released their music free on the Internet?

Of course, if said teenager was downloading a Britney Spears song then it is of course wrong, and they should be harshly punished. If they bought the Britney Spears CD then they should probably be executed.

Re:Not really the point

[Anonymous Coward]

I could get behind this theory if we applied it to other situations - for instance, if the penalty for running a giant bank into the ground so hard that the government had to spend $17 trillion dollars cleaning it up was, say, public execution. But instead what we get is a system that somehow only manages to hand out draconian punishments to the poor and (typically) non-white.

Steal a set of golf clubs and get three-striked? Jail for life.
Steal billions of shareholder dollars via mismanagement and outright fraud? Giant "severance package" and a cushy new job.

Something's just slightly fucked up there....

Re:Not really the point

[Idiomatick]

I want to point out that the laws are typically anti-poor not racist these days. We've grown past that i think. It doesn't help to misplace your anger.

Re:Rape.

[mangu]

And yes, rape is a strong word

So is "stealing" when applied to copying a CD.