"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."

Comments

The defense...

[girlintraining]

The arguments will go like this:

RIAA: Ignorance is no excuse from the law. Respect ma authoria'!
Defense: How can anyone reasonably know what is and isn't copyrighted or what the terms are if it's not included with the work?

And by a 5-3 margin, they'll say mp3s have a 'copyright bit' embedded in the ID3 tag and bypassing it is a violation of the DMCA. Common sense surrenders.

Let's turn this argument around

[syousef]

If a person can't innocently infringe because there is information out there that the material is copyrighted, it should follow that an artist (or distributor) should expect that somewhere out there is a person who will pirate the material and not pay. So why don't they just drop the case and accept that people pirate music? What you think you've got a monopoly on being unreasonable?

On what planet is any amount of personal infringment OF ENTERTAINMENT worth thousands of dollars? When I was a school kid in Australia we were taught about the attrocious and unreasonble practice of sending starving people to a prison half away around the world for stealing a loaf of bread when they were starving. Well I grant you no one ever died of not having a crappy RIAA song to listen to, but it seems we're trying to bring back the most unreasoanble and disproportionate punishments possible. What next? Should people be summarily executed for backing up a CD? Just how far is this shit going to go? And these CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY keep getting pushed onto the whole world through trade and other agreements. As a reasonable person, how the hell am I suppose to feel any kind of sympathy for people who would push such laws?

Keyword

[Anomalyx]

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

Re:Are the Supremes likely to hear it?

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

Are there sufficient legal issues here for the Court to even take up the case?

Yes there is a huge issue here. Whether the defense of "innocent infringement" is unavailable, merely because somewhere there is a copy -- which the defendant has never seen much less copied from -- that does contain a copyright notice. The appeals court's decision is ludicrous, and clearly contradicted by the statute itself, and yet it is not the first but the second appeals court to have reached that conclusion. It is vitally important that the Supreme Court remind the courts of what the statute is about.

Re:how about when same thing changes licenses term

[3seas]

There is actually at least one sales person working at MicroCenter that believes that anyone who uses Linux is a pirate because they didn't pay for it.
and those that did pay for it are pirates because those who wrote the code didn't share in the pay. Simply put Linux is for Pirates.

So how about everyone everywhere assume everything is either copyrighted or patented or trademarked and just submit to "them" who ever "them" may be.

Does that work for you joe the dragon? Or are you now going to sue me for using your copyrighted nick.

Seriously, the RiAA and court system has way over stepped punishment of the guilty and everyone knows it.

Simple solution: Watermarks

[VortexCortex]

All copyrighted songs should be required to have at least one "Backup Singer" that sings the lyrics to the license agreement for the duration of the song.