Making a file available on Napster doesn't equal Napster committing copyright infringement, a federal judge has ruled in throwing out a music industry lawsuit against the former granddaddy of peer-to-peer reborn as a pay-to-play Internet music store.
U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel held May 11 that the music industry didn't prove, under the just-signed federal Artists' Rights and Theft Prevention Act (ART Act), whether the law dealt with more than infringing works that weren't published yet.
"If Congress wanted to make clear that the distribution right was broad enough to encompass making a work available to the public without proof of actual distribution, it is perfectly capable of doing so," Patel wrote in her ruling. "Plaintiffs . . . suggest that their 'making available' interpretation of the distribution right is compelled by the fact the ART act imposes criminal liability on a class of infringing acts involving . . . 'the distribution of a work being prepared for commercial distribution, by making it available on a computer network accessible to members of the public.'"
In other words, the plaintiffs – including Universal Music Group and songwriting and production legend Jerry Lieber – disregarded the ART Act's language that willful infringement is entirely distinct from making an infringed work available on a computer network.
"Regardless of the manner in which a court interprets . . . the Copyright Act for the purpose of finding copyright infringement, criminal liability under the ART Act cannot be imposed unless such an act of infringement is proven beyond a reasonable doubt," Patel wrote.
Signed by President Bush in April, the ART Act slaps up to three years in prison and hundreds of thousands in fines for distributing prereleased movies online. Several analysts thought the law left too much room to chase P2P networks because, as they saw it, leaving files open in shared or exposed folders under the ART Act would be enough to get a P2P network prosecuted even if no files were swapped.
