The music industry has taken a second federal appellate blow against its bid to force Internet service providers to identify peer-to-peer music downloaders.
A three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled January 3 that the Recording Industry Association of America could not force Charter Communications to give up the identities of a reported 93 customers said to have swapped over 100,000 music files online, and that Charter should not have been compelled to do so under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The ruling concurred with a similar ruling from the District of Columbia U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in late 2003, upholding Verizon Online against the RIAA.
"[I]t is the province of Congress, not the courts, to decide whether to rewrite the DMCA 'in order to make it fit a new and unforeseen internet architecture' and 'accommodate fully the varied permutations of competing interests that are inevitably implicated by such new technology'," wrote 8th Circuit Judge Kermit Bye for the 2-1 panel majority.
Charter was hit with RIAA subpoenas in November 2003 and argued that a lower court ruling enforcing the subpoenas was wrong because the DCMA applied only to those ISPs who actually store copyrighted material.
"…[B]ecause the parties do not dispute that Charter's function was limited to acting as a conduit for the allegedly copyright protected material, we agree [the DMCA] does not authorize the subpoenas issued here," Bye continued. "As a court we are bound to interpret the terms of the statute and not to contort the statute so as to cover the situation presented by this case."
The court panel held that Charter was nothing more than a "conduit in the transfer of files through its network" – comparable to earlier court rulings that held two peer-to-peer networks could not be held directly responsible for users' swapping of copyright material illegally.
The holdout was Circuit Judge Diana E. Murphy, who wrote in a dissenting opinion that rulings like this block copyright holders from protecting their work and that the music industry's having to resort to litigation because of that was cumbersome and costly.
"The repercussions of infringement via the Internet are too easily ignored or minimized," Murphy wrote. "Regarded by some as an innocuous form of entertainment, Internet piracy of copyrighted sound recordings results in substantial economic and artistic costs."
The music industry has claimed billions lost thanks to peer-to-peer file swapping, while other analyses have suggested P2P swapping has not prevented the music industry from enjoying strong store sales and concert revenues.
