EFF attacks foundation of entire RIAA lawsuit
EFF attacks foundation of entire RIAA lawsuit campaign:
By Nate Anderson | Published: June 22, 2008 - 09:03PM CT
The Electronic Frontier Foundation weighed in this week on the Jammie Thomas file-swapping case, where the judge has asked for public comment on whether just making a file available for download on a P2P network should count as copyright infringement. In its filing (PDF), the EFF goes for the jugular, seeking to show that the RIAA’s entire approach to file-swapping cases is flawed.
from the article:
So RIAA investigators just have to download the file instead of peeking into a shared folder, right? Sure, it’s a bit more resource intensive, but it’s not big deal.
Not quite, says the EFF in its brief; downloads by MediaSentry and other investigators don’t count, either.
“It is axiomatic that a copyright owner cannot infringe her own copyright,” says the brief in its concluding section. “By the same token, an authorized agent acting on behalf of the copyright owner also cannot infringe any rights held by that owner. Accordingly, where the only evidence of infringing distribution consists of distributions to authorized agents of the copyright owner, that evidence cannot, by itself, establish that other, unauthorized distributions have taken place.”
OUCH