Filesharing, RIAA and Linux

(Apologies to posters like John-Paul who're outside the United States of Disney^WAmerica: The original post was inappropriate for most of this newsgroup's worldwide readership, in addition to being off-topic.)

OK, I was hoping not to have to get into this, but....

trolling; he just was poorly informed about the cases in question, and going off half-chickened.

He thus missed the main point: In the Grokster and StreamCast Networks Morpheus decisions, the court had, actually, specifically refused to tamper with the test established in the 1983 Sony Betamax decision -- that as long as the technology had a "significant non-infringing use", it is perfectly lawful per se. In that, it even specifically rejected plaintiffs' argument about counting percentages of infringing vs. non-infringing downloads.

It found secondary liability based on "inducement": It held that the defendents actively and egregiously encouraged and profited from their end users' breaking of copyright -- essentially, that their business models and customer communications were based on the active encouragement of copyright infringement.

That is not to say that what's "fair use" is now written in stone and crystal clear. But then, it never was before, either.

Now, if "Koppe74" had just posted this to the EFF newsgroup in the first place, where it would have been on-topic, he would have gotten straightened out right away -- or, if he'd been a reader of that group, might have gotten it right before posting. That's one of the hazards of posting to an off-topic group: If you get it wrong, most of the time, there's nobody who knows enough to correct your misconception. This time there was.

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