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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."
Since I really don't want to bother reading 59 pages just to get the answer to this question, does it address how Limewire "encouraged" people to download copyrighted material? Is it simply because it allows people to make whatever they have available, and that just happened to be what some people make available?
Does it explain how this is different from, say, an automobile? After all, cars can be used to transport just about anything. Illegal things like unlicensed guns, drugs, teenagers across state lines, stolen merchandise, illegal aliens, bodies of people you've just murdered, cases of laundered cash for organized crime bosses, etc. They can also be used to transport legal stuff, like my ass back and forth to work every day.
I guess what I'm really not getting is, if Joe Schmo gets caught using his 1979 Impala to haul illegal copies of Free Willy DVDs, will the RIAA/MPAA sue Chevrolet?
The court's reasoning seems to be:
a) Limewire allows you to search by genre and album which supposedly is there to encourage infringement. But the court doesn't seem to care that there is a lot of material that the owners permit to be freely exchanged that is legitimately able to be searched and downloaded by album or genre.
b) The large percentage of real-world downloading that seems to be infringing. This seems to be a dangerous precedent. What if someone showed that 95% of betamax users had at some time infringed copyright (seems quite possible to me). Does that mean the govt. can now ban video recorders? If 98% of computer users are infringing copyright, and Intel knows it, is Intel out of business? Should exciting new technologies and techniques be outlawed because many users are abusing it? If most drivers speed, should cars be banned? Should good technology be killed because some or even most users decide to abuse it? Where does this line of thinking end?
c) Limewire did not put filtering in to try and mitigate infringment. This seems akin to banning Firefox because the browser doesn't implement filtering. Why doesn't firefox stop you downloading infringing files? Why doesn't it look for "Madonna" in the name of files and stop you downloading them? It sounds ridiculous, but this is exactly what the court is suggesting.
And nobody seems to notice that Gnutella and Limewire and the entire system are open source and truely distributed. If they shut down limewire nothing whatsoever would happen. Not a single file would be prevented from being downloaded. People would eventually switch to other clients like Frostwire, but the RIAA gains nothing. This is different to Napster and the RIAA's other targets which could be shut down.