Follow-Up On the File Sharing Lawsuit
In one of my very first posts, I wrote about a woman who was sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for loading some songs onto Kazaa. A jury in Minnesota ordered her to pay $222,000 in damages.
At the conclusion of my post, I said the following:
“Oh yeah, and that ridiculous award amount? Won’t hold up in a million years. I don’t know what the hell these people were smoking, but how in God’s name can they divine that much damage by a lousy 24 songs sitting on Kazaa… with no actual proof anyone downloaded them or that any actual ”sharing” occurred?”
Well forget a million, because it took less than one year for an appeals judge to overturn the verdict. Money quote: “Her status as a consumer who was not seeking to harm her competitors or make a profit does not excuse her behavior. But it does make the award of hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages unprecedented and oppressive.”
His further conclusions mirror my thoughts as well. He concludes that just placing the files on a server that others access does not constitute ‘distribution,’ blowing one of the major contentions of the RIAA out of the water. Quoting again: “The Court’s examination of the use of the term ‘distribution’ in other provisions of the Copyright Act, as well as the evolution of liability for offers to sell in the analogous Patent Act, lead to the conclusion that the plain meaning of the term ‘distribution’ does not include making available and, instead, requires actual dissemination,”
Interesting. Now if the RIAA will do as I previously suggested and focus their time and effort putting out a better product and working on a decent price point, and less time chasing people around the block, we’d all be better off for it.
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