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Court Grants RIAA Summary Judgment Motions vs. Limewire
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "District Court Judge Kimba Wood has granted some of the RIAA's key summary judgment motions in Arista Records v. Lime Group. In her 59-page decision (PDF), she found Lime Group itself, as well as its CEO and a separate company, liable for intentionally inducing Limewire users to infringe plaintiffs' copyrights. The decision was not a final judgment, so it is not appealable. Additionally, it denied summary judgment on certain issues, and did not address any possible damages."
One of the judgments was on unfair competition.
Really?
REALLY? /me holds up a mirror to the Board of Directors of the RIAA
I need a new irony meter. Mine just exploded.
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BMO
P.S. I will honor the RIAA as a legal entity when The Romantics see a dime for "What I Like About You"
Well, that's just it. I've looked pretty thoroughly at Limewire's web site, and I'm just not seeing any reference at all to illegal downloads. In fact, the site looks on the surface to be pretty vanilla corporate-type design. Maybe the judge has some kind of smoking gun I'm just not seeing, but as far as I know, Limewire has never advertised itself as a product you should use to download files illegally. (But granted, being a commercial implementation of something I can get for free without adware infestation, I've never looked too closely into it.)
Well, another analogy I can think of is the sale and use of so-called "Saturday night special" handguns. In spite of their prevalent use in criminal activities, a lawsuit against them was dismissed in 2003, and they remain largely unregulated today.
Not saying that they should or shouldn't, I'm just saying that it seems to me that it's awful inconsistent to pass summary judgment--as in, they didn't even get a trial--when other companies that specialize in providing stuff that is foreseeably used quite often, if not mostly, in illegal activities gets a free pass. Hell, if I wanted to, I could even buy a set of lockpicks and go to town. (Or more to the point, go to your house.)
IANAL, but that position is pretty thin.
For one, illegal or not the RIAA sues people using tracked downloads as evidence of filesharing. It will either cost you 10k to settle, or at least 10k in legal fees. In practical terms then, there definitely is something wrong in downloading a file to check it out, and it will be viable evidence against you in a court of law.
For another, you're not opening a magazine to see if you want to buy it or not. You're inducing copyright infringement to get an illegal copy. Even if it is to "decide if you want to buy," the fact remains that someone violated copyright at your request, and that you most definitely knew it was going to happen. At minimum, that makes you guilty of being an accessory to copyright infringement, inducing copyright infringement, and conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, which have been ruled illegal in various locals at various times. Further, an overpaid lawyer could easily argue that the copy being made at your request makes you a joint principle in the act. Pressing "download" on bittorrent is like pressing the copy button on a xerox, irrespective of who owns the xerox and who loaded the book into the copier. A skilled lawyer would argue that the uploader isn't making any copies at all, they're just holding up a book saying "come make copies of this." The downloaders are the ones who bring their little xerox machines, and suddenly have identical bits on their computers.
Maybe a real lawyer could chime in on this subject (please?). But things definitely aren't as black-and-white as "uploading is illegal, downloading is legal."
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