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."

Comments

In Summary

[phantomfive]

In summary, it is illegal to download copyrighted material (without permission), or to encourage others to do so. Go ahead and do it, but realize you are doing so at your own peril.

Re:In Summary

[KingSkippus]

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?

Re:In Summary

[Yez70]

Actually - it IS NOT illegal to download anything. Stop trying to distort the truth. It does not say that anywhere in this judgement and it does not say that anywhere in the law. The issue is distribution - not downloading. The only illegal issue is the 'unauthorized distribution' as in uploading or sharing copyrighted files with others without authorization from the copyright owners. There is nothing wrong with downloading a file to check it out. It is no different than opening a magazine to see if you want to buy it at the store. You are not stealing the magazine, you're just looking at it. Photocopying the magazine AND giving it to someone else would be illegal though - get it?

Re:In Summary

[McBeer]

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?

If Chevy was actively advertising how many illegal DVDs you can fit in the car and DVD bootlegging in Impalas ran rampant maybe. Otherwise, they are probably safe. It seems to come down to if a product is used mainly for illegal activity and the manufacturer encourages that illegal activity. Google's and Chevy's products serve mostly legal purposes. Limewire and co have some legal uses, but mostly are used for illegal file sharing. It's a somewhat nebulous issue since it's hard to say what "mainly used for" and "encouraging" actually mean. The courts seem to be busily establishing case law for that though.

Re:In Summary

[KingSkippus]

If Chevy was actively advertising how many illegal DVDs you can fit in the car...

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.)

...and DVD bootlegging in Impalas ran rampant maybe.

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.)

Re:In Summary

[whoever57]

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.)

I would not advise that, at least not where I live. Some time back, a mechanic who was driving me home (after dropping my car at a transmission shop) told me that, later that day, he had to meet with the local DA because they were threatening to prosecute his son (also a mechanic) for walking the streets with a screwdriver in his pocket.

Re:In Summary

[cgenman]

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."

Re:In Summary

[westlake]

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

From the LA Times:

Relying on the Supreme Court's ruling in MGM v Grokster, Wood held that the defendants deliberately induced LimeWire users to violate copyrights, and that it profited from the infringements. Here's a snippet from the ruling (Wood refers to the company LimeWire by the initials LW):

[T]he following factors, taken together, establish that LW intended to encourage infringement by distributing LimeWire: (1) LW's awareness of substantial infringement by users; (2) LW's efforts to attract infringing users; (3) LW's efforts to enable and assist users to commit infringement; (4) LW's dependence on infringing use for the success of its business; and (5) LW's failure to mitigate infringing activities.

Most of those factors are non-controversial applications of the Grokster principle that folks who encourage piracy in order to profit from it are liable for infringement. Wood cited internal documents to show that LimeWire executives knew most of its users were downloading songs illegally, and that they sought out such users through, among other things, "press campaigns on college campuses relating to 'file-sharing and getting free MP3's.' " The company aids would-be infringers, Wood wrote, by enabling them to search by categories (such as Classic Rock and Top 40) that "inevitably guide users to copyrighted recordings." She also noted that the more users it attracts, the more revenue it collects from advertisers and consumers who buy the ad-free version of the software.

Wood's fifth factor, however, suggests that liability might ensue merely from the way a technology is designed and used. According to Wood, LimeWire built a filter into the software that could block copyrighted works from being downloaded, but left it inoperative unless users turned it on. A separate filter, however, barred users from sharing the songs they bought from the LimeWire store.

This selective filtering further demonstrates LW's knowledge of infringement-mitigating technologies and the company's intentional decision not to employ any such technologies in a way that meaningfully deters LimeWire users' infringing activities....

Failure to utilize existing technology to create meaningful barriers against infringement is a strong indicator of intent to foster infringement.

As for former CEO Gorton, Wood cited precedents that held company executives liable for infringements when they had the ability to supervise them and they benefited from them. She went on to note:

Gorton directed and approved many aspects of LimeWire's design and development. Gorton admits that he conceived of LimeWire and decided that the program should be decentralized and should use P2P technology.... Gorton oversaw the development of LimeWire's filtering system, and decided that the filter should be turned "off" by default.... This evidence, taken together, also establishes that Gorton knew about the infringement being committed through LimeWire.

Another win for the RIAA

Re:In Summary

[phantomfive]

Actually - it IS NOT illegal to download anything

Sure, keep telling yourself that. Meanwhile, back in reality, we are under US copyright law (in the US, obviously).

We also have case law showing that your argument does not stand up in court. From the judgement by the appellate court, we have this lovely quote:

As [the defendant] tells the tale, downloading on a try-before-you-buy basis is good advertising for copyright proprietors, expanding the value of their inventory. The Supreme Court thought otherwise in Grokster, with considerable empirical support.

I'm not talking about morality here, I'm talking about the legality of the matter. You can feel free to try that defense if you ever end up in court over this, but you will lose. Get it?

Re:In Summary

[phantomfive]

It may be considered illegal to distribute copyrighted material withouth the copyright owner's explicit authorization if and only if you don't do it for personal use alone and you enjoy a financial profit from it.

This is a common misconception among pirates, and it is completely wrong. At least four different things are taken into consideration when it comes to fair use, among those are how much of the work is being used. A complete copy of an item is not likely to fall under fair use. A 30 second clip on iTunes probably (but not necessarily) would.

If you want to see how the court handles an argument similar to yours, check out this case. They decided strongly against the defendant, and even addressed your claim of 'personal use:'

[The defendant] was not engaged in a nonprofit use; she downloaded (and kept) whole copyrighted songs (for which, as with poetry, copying of more than a couplet or two is deemed excessive); and she did this despite the fact that these works often are sold per song as well as per album.

So once again, if you want to download songs, it is up to you, but don't do it under the illusion that it's in any way legal.

Re:In Summary

[rolfwind]

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.

Your entire argument is retarded. First, you're using language (accessory) to a criminal offense, not a civil one -- which AFAIK, copyright infringement is.

Second, going by your argument, if you were responsible for downloads, every time you open a webpage, you would open yourself up to liability. Who owns that font? Who owns that clipart? Or those jpegs? Haven't you ever heard of websites using other website author's templates, either knowingly or unknowingly. Should you the browser be liable then? Browsing is downloading, although we have been conditioned to associated so-called "illegal downloading" with music/movies -- in fact copyright would protect everything down to the lowly font, jpeg, and animated gif.

A downloader is not responsible to know whether the place he is downloading from owns/licensed proper copyright. Moralely perhaps, but legally he should not, if for nothing else because it would be impossible to ascertain all the elements are owned by said parties and in many cases impossible to know beforehand.

Re:In Summary

[SharpFang]

Misconception? Maybe in the US.
GP post states this is common in most countries. I can confirm some. The four fair use clauses are US-specific. Other countries have very different rules, and often "personal use" is perfectly legal. So, the misconception may be only common with US file sharers. With the others, it's not a misconception.

Re:In Summary

[Alsee]

Both distribution and creating copies fall under infringement. That would be Title 17 section 106 of US law, and that's the same across the globe. Downloading is creating a copy. Uploading and downloading are essentially equivalent under copyright law.

if you were responsible for downloads, every time you open a webpage, you would open yourself up to liability

Correct.
Unbelievable, but essentially correct.

If someone were actually to sue you in court in such a situation, you would pretty much two avenues of defense under U.S. law. Either a Fair Use defense or an Innocent Infringer defense. Note that in either case the law starts from an assumption of guilt and then places the burden upon you to prove your defense.

A Fair Use defense could probably work under these circumstances, and if it does your liability is zero. However the concept of Fair use is a somewhat peculiar fit for these circumstances. Fair Use is not really intended to fix this kind of problem. Innocent Infringer status is actually the "correct" defense to fit this situation. The circumstances you described would give you an instant slam-dunk win on claiming Innocent Infringer status.

And guess how fucked up copyright law is? Under the law an an Innocent Infringer is someone who, through no fault of his own, has technically committed copyright infringement. No fault, no guilt, just an ordinary innocent person who was lied to or given infringing material by some other guilty party. And under US law that means you technically did infringe on someone's copyright. You admitted to this when you laid out the situation. And under those circumstances, IF you prove yourself to be an Innocent Infringer, US law states that the judge is permitted to lower the statutory liability from the standard $750 minimum to a $200 minimum.

US LAW, TITLE 17, CHAPTER 5, SECTION 504, SUBSECTION C, PARAGRAPH 2

And if you think it's insane for you to be liable for $200 damages in your example after proving your Innocent Infringer status, just be glad your example wasn't P2P. If you engage in multiple infringements on P2P you are going to fall under the NET Act. And the NET Act was literally written by copyright industry lawyers, and they slipped in a trick-clause to redefine P2P as "financial gain". And that shoves you under the statutory category originally intended to deal with commercial copyright infringement enterprises. And this commercial infringement statute is a criminal infringement statute. It is a felony infringement statute. If you engage in multiple P2P infringements you technically fall under criminal copyright infringement imposing up to 1, 3, or 5 years in prison depending largely on the number of files involved. Ah, and the sentence is generally doubled on a second offense, up to 10 years in prison.

Here's a link to the Net Act. Pay particular attention to the clause that redefines "financial gain". Note how virtually anyone who has ever touched P2P gets magically swept into the commercial-infringement category.

-

Re:In Summary

[AndersOSU]

Actually, I remember a lawsuit recently being dismissed against gun manufacturers who consistently marketed their guns with "fingerprint resistant grips and triggers."

But, uh, they weren't marketing for use in crimes, because as everyone knows, fingerprint resistant is *completely* interchangeable with corrosion resistant - something every legitimate gun owner is interested in.

Additionally, I haven't used limewire in a long time, but do you have any examples of limewire promoting that message?

In other news .... yawn

[NewsWatcher]

And so the good ole Gnutella network will find another platform so the masses can file share, just like it has been doing since it was released in 2000.

All the legal arguments and judgements in the world won't make a spit of difference. If people want to trade files online, the chances of anything happening to them are remote, so they will continue.

Remember how shutting down KaZaa was supposed to deal a huge blow to filesharing, as were the lawsuits against a host of others?

Wasn't the lawsuit that saw the Pirate Bay founders jailed supposed to send a message the law enforcement was tough on piracy?

Forgive my scepticism, but I look at this news and wonder, does it really matter to anyone save those directly employed by Lime.

Summary Judgment isn't the end of the story...

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

> The decision was not a final judgment, so it is not appealable.

Not immediately appealable, anyway.

For the nonlawyers in the room, summary judgment means basically that somebody wins their argument, or parts of their argument, because even if everything the other guy said was true, the other guy still loses. Like if you ask a kid "Did you throw a rock at Timmy?" And the kid says "I did, but I like throwing rocks!" or "It was a horseshoe, not a rock."

In this case, even if everything Limewire said was true, they still lose. (At least, they still lose everything they lost here.)

The decision can usually be appealed, but only after the trial ends or in rare cases with special permission. Since it influences the outcome of settlement proceedings, and most things settle, they are rarely but not never appealed.

google is next

[NynexNinja]

inducing infringement is such a vague term, it means google is inducing infridgement by people searching for torrents on google... all you have to do is search for: torrent, and you pretty much turn google into the biggest torrent site. Are they liable for the actions of their users? The MPAA and RIAA think they are... Under that theory, gun manufacturers would be liable for murder caused by their guns. Next they'll be arresting the owners of Stanley Tools for selling tools that are used to break open windows and rob homes... Louisanna Slugger baseball bats because they can are used for hitting people instead of baseballs. Programmers for writing code that is used unlawfully. Where does it end?

Re:google is next

[cgenman]

Under most legal systems, there are codified common sense notions. A physicist could argue that when applying muscular force to a finger, they couldn't be sure that this would move a metal bar, which would release a spring, which would cause a spark, which would ignite a sulfurous potassium nitrate solution, which would increase the air pressure behind a metallic tube, which would accelerate the tube along the x-axis at a rapid rate, which would strike a subsequent object, which would cause soft tissue damage. But a court would say that they knew they were going to kill someone when they fired a gun. The apparent motivation doesn't need to be scientifically proven, it just needs to be beyond a reasonable doubt.

Similarly, if someone released a search engine that simply queried google with torrent, and advertised as the best place to find hollywood releases, they'd be guilty of inducing infringement. Beyond a reasonable doubt, that modified search engine is there to search for illegal content.

Just because they're offering a subset of a larger feature set doesn't mean that they're OK, or that the larger feature set would be illegal. To torture an analogy: If you offer a gun for sale, it can be used for a wide variety of illegal and legal actions. The courts have ruled in the US that there are enough legal uses for guns in general that selling them is not inducement to crime. However, if you offered a gun that could only shoot homeowners during robberies, your featureset and viable uses would be narrowed such that a reasonable person would think that gun was being sold in order to commit a crime. If you offered a gun that could only shoot Jewish homeowners during robberies, you might similarly be guilty of inducement to commit a hate crime.

Limewire had a product that they advertised to college students as where you go to get MP3's. They extensively supported MP3 tagging and naming in their interface. They had a system for filtering out illegal music, which was off by default, and a second system for filtering out music purchased from Limewire's partners, which was not disableable. In short, they knew of the infringement on their system, promoted themselves as a platform for that infringement, and took steps to prevent just the infringement on their own copyrights while allowing the rest. That's enough for a reasonable person to think that Limewire is specifically encouraging breaking the law on their platform.

judgment

[countach]

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.

Unfair competition?

[bmo]

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.

--
BMO

P.S. I will honor the RIAA as a legal entity when The Romantics see a dime for "What I Like About You"

Trillions of dollars

[TouchAndGo]

In a comment the other day someone pointed out that the RIAA etc. hardly ever go after any major distributors of their work, preferring to target individual end users, because judgements against people responsible for thousands of instances of copyright infringement would make it obvious how absurd the damages awarded per instance were. However: "The RIAA has said it is entitled to the maximum statutory damages, which is $150,000 for each registered work that was infringed. The number of infringing works they could try to claim is likely in the millions." from http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20004811-261.html So basically the RIAA believes they're entitled to a multi trillion dollar damages award?

Re:Huh? What? Who?

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

New York Lawyer, my good man, thanks 10,000 times for your work and effort, but as a non-lawyer I have NO IDEA what your post means. It must be bad, but really I don't know what it means. Can you tell me, a non-lawyer, what it means other than "You're screwed" or some such thing? I just don't know...

Sure.

It means Lime Wire might be screwed.

Re:Go turn yourself in

[ultranova]

Seriously, how on earth could you believe that an ordinary person could not occasionally infringe copyright?

It's convenient to have laws that make everyone a criminal, now isn't it?

This is not bad news

[192939495969798999]

The reason this is good news is that the govt has now specified how to setup a legal filesharing company. Limewire screwed up because they talked about getting free stuff in their ads on campuses. So for future reference, DO NOT talk about getting free stuff there that should cost money. Just talk about it's legit uses, like what MJ pipe sales places have to do when they call a bong a "water pipe". If you talk about MJ in such a place you get thrown out because "they are not a MJ paraphernalia store"... get it?