Word: copyright
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Absolutely not. Johnny Deep at Aimster insists his service is legally watertight because it's completely decentralized - and the appeals court made a very clear distinction that a site isn't responsible for copyright infringement if it has no way to monitor or stop it. Most of the other sites - Gnutella, BearShare and the rest - look to have that same built-in protection...
...melody could linger awhile. Having had her first stop-the-music order from last July - which gave Napster just 48 hours to strip its site of all avenues of "vicarious copyright infringement" - sent back for minor revisions by an appeals court, Patel may be looking for a more lasting solution this time around...
...category of fair use does not take care of the conflicts between free speech and contributory copyright infringement, which the Supreme Court has never addressed in a non-commercial environment. OpenNap isn't engaged in any commercial activity: it merely reports on the status of connected servers. If a newspaper reported that "A large pile of CD's ready for copying have been sighted on a park bench on 53rd St.," no one would dream of taking them to court--but if it wrote that "The file foo.txt can be found on a server at 140.247.83.245," this might constitute contributory...
...ignoring the protections granted to speech, the Ninth Circuit created a dangerous gray area for new Internet protocols. How useful must a piece of information be before it becomes illegal? How effective must a search tool be before it becomes contributory infringement? If I duplicate copyrighted text on my website, could Google be sued for indexing it--or, God forbid, for keeping a cached copy on its own servers? There is no room for gray areas in this body of law. Either an act is contributory infringement or it isn't, and the failure to draw clear lines creates chilling...
ISPs are already required to respond to requests to remove copyrighted materials--so copyright authors already have a remedy. Burdening search engines and other indexing services with a responsibility to filter their results through an RIAA-approved list would only slow their searches and dragoon their employees into the service of the copyright industry...