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"RIAA vs Princeton student(s)"
04/09/2003 Entry
You may have heard that last week the Recording Industry Association of America sued a Princeton student - one of four nationwide - because he allegedly [pdf] "hijacked an academic computer network and installed on it a marketplace for copyright piracy that is used by others to copy and distribute music illegally. In addition to operating this piracy marketplace that facilitates direct copyright infringement by others, Defendant is committing direct copyright infringement himself by copying and distributing hundreds of sound recordings over his system without the authorization of the copyright owners."
Yesterday, another Princeton student, Joe Barillari, posted an interesting, thoughtful and thorough analysis of the complaint that is worth looking at. Here's the Executive Summary:
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued Dan Peng, a Princeton sophomore, for direct and contributory infringement of their members' copyrights. This essay analyzes that contributory infringement claim. Peng allegedly operated a computer service called "wake" which cataloged the publicly-shared files on the campus network. The RIAA draws a parallel between "wake" and Napster, and calls upon the court to apply the reasoning from the Napster case. Their analysis falls short in three respects:
- "Wake" differs fundamentally from Napster in that it (allegedly) indexed a pre-existing network, just as Web search engines index the pre-existing web. Napster, on the other hand, created the network on which its users traded music.
- Napster's software indexed and shared only MP3 audio files. Wake, on the other hand, (allegedly) indexed all public documents on the network, which substantially expands its range of non-infringing uses.
- "Wake," as a pure search engine (rather than a search-engine-plus-file-sharing-system, as Napster was), is protected by the DMCA, a fact which the RIAA does not address.
It got picked up on Slashdot so it got some good exposure.
Joe points to a find on Zack Rosen's site that suggests Microsoft may be the next one the RIAA may want to go after on such grounds.
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