RIAA's Big Dog Lawyers Draw First Blood from Napster
Legal Ruling Could Have Chilling Impact on Net
Will this Affect Other Services Like AOL?
May 9, 2000
U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Patel in San Francisco late on Friday rejected Napster's claim that it is a "mere conduit'' and said it was liable for material transferred by its song-swap program. Napster, in its motion for a summary judgment in the case, had claimed that it was merely a service provider and was not liable for the actions of its users.
Napster's claim for protection was based on the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act which was passed by congress to protect service providers from copyright lawsuits stemming from the activities of their customers.
This has previously been a very successful defense for companies like AOL, Prodigy, Yahoo and others. Of course, they didn't face the wrath of the Recording Industry. None-the-less this raises questions about future lawsuits. Has a defining precedent been set?
In the early days of the Internet lawsuits abounded, both on copyright issues and other "freedom of speech" issues. In a series of closely watched court cases the Internet Service Providers claimed, exactly as Napster did in this case, that they were only conduits for users activities, similar to the telephone companies or post office. As such they were not responsible for individual's activities and were not the proper target for these lawsuits. AOL and the service providers won those cases. Friday's ruling represents a major reversal.
The potential impact is frightening. It may be "safer" for large and very rich corporate companies to simply deny individual users the ability to transmit individual ideas, news, stories, photographs, music or any other "potentially copyrighted" material, rather than face multimillion dollar lawsuits.
Napster's software works like a co-op, allowing users to trade their library of MP3 files, a compression format used to convert music on CDs into computer files.
On top of the MP3.com ruling the RIAA is on the road to a major sweep of court cases surrounding the issue of consumer copying of music.
The WIZARD wants to know if consumers start playing CD's over the telephone to their friends will the RIAA sue AT&T?
While that is unlikely, the ruling could force dramatic changes in the Internet, causing irreparable damage to the ability of individuals to use this medium in an open and free manner. Clearly, any powerful group (political action groups, governmental agencies, large corporations) could use this approach (sue the ISP) to shut down any site they disagreed with.
The only positive note in all this is that it is still impossible for the RIAA to win the war against the MP3 format. Consumers will win that battle in the long run, but Freedom on the Internet itself may be destroyed as a casualty of the war. All that would be left is a shell - a one way broadcasting medium owned by AOL/Time Warner with the total disregard for consumers they recently exhibited in the ABC dispute.
