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"Innocent Infringement" Defense May Reach Supreme Court
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Several years ago a federal court in Texas ordered the RIAA, in an 'innocent infringement' case against a teenager, to either accept $200 per infringed work, or to go to trial over the innocent infringement issue, in Maverick Recording Co v. Harper. Recently, an appeals court reversed, saying that the defendant could not avail herself of the innocent infringement defense since there were CDs, bearing copyright notices, available in stores, even though the copies she had made were from MP3 files which bore no such notice. Now, a petition for certiorari has been filed on the defendant's behalf, arguing that the 5th Circuit's ruling would make it impossible for anyone to interpose an innocent infringement case, even where they had never seen a copyright notice. The lawyers filing the petition on defendant's behalf are the same firm that represented Jammie Thomas in her second trial, and the motion which resulted in her verdict being reduced from $1.92 million to $54,000."
Key word in the title of the post: "Innocent Infringement" Defense May Reach Supreme Court
from Wikipedia entry for Certiorari:
The court denies the vast majority of petitions and thus leaves the decision of the lower court to stand without review; it takes roughly 80 to 150 cases each term. In the most recently-concluded term, for example, 8,241 petitions were filed, with a grant rate of approximately 1.1%
Those are some slim chances
No, there is no "-1 I'LL NEVER ADMIT BEING WRONG!!!" mod.
Retail theft is a crime nolle nonspartis, which means "without notice (required)", so theft is theft whether or not you were put on notice. If you know it is not your property and take it, you have committed theft.
Copyright infringement, at least in the US, is a crime willeus tenspartum, which means "willingness demostrated" (roughly), in other words, you have to intend to commit the crime. If you didn't know and intend to infringe, you have not committed the crime (though you may be liable for significantly reduced damages, so you don't get off scot free)
You have no clue what you're talking about, throwing out nonsensical Latin jargon. Nolle is an actual Latin word meaning "to not be willing," I'll give you that -- but "nonspartis" is nonsense, and so is "willeus" and "tenspartum." Nolle prosequi is a Latin legal term meaning "to not be willing to prosecute" (literally) -- where someone will not pursue further legal action on a case. IANAL, however. You should have saved everyone the trouble and not posted, given that you are clearly no lawyer, either.
The person has to really not know that it's copyrighted, to qualify for the defense. But even if he or she doesn't know, he or she will be precluded if the one they copied had a copyright notice on it.
These judges went further, and said she's precluded because somewhere, in some store somewhere, there's a copy with a copyright notice on it. I.e., they basically ruled that there is no "innocent infringement" defense, which is ridiculous, and contrary to the plain wording of the statute.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Copyrighted and illegal to download are two different things, or more specifically copyrighted + illegal to download doesn't apply to all copyrighted songs. Independent artists and even some major artists release songs for free all the time.
The existence of a single free to download mainstream song renders the argument that 'all mainstream music is illegal to download' invalid, and there's plenty of songs on torrents that are actually legal to download and listen too.
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
So how about everyone everywhere assume everything is either copyrighted or patented or trademarked and just submit to "them" who ever "them" may be.
Your Linux distribution has a trademarked logo. The software is licensed. It just might include some patented technologies.
H.264 support in Ubuntu's OEM distribution, for example.
Most of the software in Ubuntu is covered under the GNU General Public License. This *is* a license agreement. Unlike most license agreements, however, it does not restrict your usage of the software, but it does restrict the terms under which you can re-distribute it. /usr/share/doc/*/copyright. Ubuntu license agreement
Likewise, while most of the software is covered by the GPL, *all* the software on the system is covered by some kind of license agreement be it MIT, X, Artistic, Apache, BSD, GPL, LGPL, etc, etc.
You will find the license agreements for the various pieces of software installed on your system in
The "Creative Commons" license is - by default - a license protected by the law of copyright:
CC's Unported licenses were created using standard terms from the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works and other international treaties related to copyright and intellectual property. FFAQ
MicroCenter.com stocks all of 13 items in Linux software, including, somewhat improbably, Slackware Linux.
Linux Software
MicroCenter catalogs about 30,000 items in all.
In hardware, 2 low-spec Ubuntu Linux [Desktop] PCs.
That the - IP protected to the max - product owns the consumer market space couldn't be made plainer.