On March 31, a federal District Court in New York provided “specific language” for labels to use when suing someone who didn’t necessarily share files per se, but merely placed them in a context in which they’re allowed to be shared.
Basically: A lady got sued in August 2005 for having 600 MP3s in her Kazaa shared folder. The woman, along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Computer & Communications Industry Association, filed briefs saying, “Wait, guys, you don’t have any proof that these files were shared, just that they were in a shared folder.”
Copyright law regulates “publication,” which has a fancy legal definition wherein you distribute something by selling it or giving it away or lending it or whatever. The labels were accusing the woman of making a work available for “distribution,” which is a situation copyright law that hadn’t really been tackled yet.
Now I’m beginning to understand why this has taken so long.
The District Court spent over two-and-a-half years doing something, then issued a statement at the end of last month agreeing with the labels and alleging that, from a digital copyright law standpoint, “publication” and “distribution” are synonymous. An 11-year-old could have probably told you that the two words mean pretty much the same thing, of course, but from a legal standpoint, this provides a tiny little hole through which the RIAA can continue its string of large-figure lawsuits against just about everybody.
According to the new ruling, it’s kosher to sue for "offer(ing) to distribute copies or phonorecords (MP3s) to a group of persons for purposes of further distribution." Having files in a shared folder can be considered a tacit kind of offering, so here we are. People don’t use Kazaa anymore, but I could see this eventually affecting FTPs or, really, just about any method of transferring files from one computer to another. Of course, as long as legal proceedings move at about one-millionth the pace of file-sharing technology, piracy will probably reign. Woo.
