It's been a while since there's been a high profile trial against the maker of P2P software, though the US industry's litigation against Limewire is still going through the motions. But there is one such case in court right now in Spain, where the music industry is suing one Pablo Soto and his company MP2P Technologies over allegations that he has contributed to widespread copyright infringement by making available three P2P file-sharing clients, Blubster, Piolet and Manolito P2P.
The lawsuit, of course, is based on the assumption that the vast majority of people who download Soto's software then use it to access unlicensed content off other file-sharers. The record companies and publishers are suing for 13 million euros, based on the allegation that 25 million people have downloaded his software and the presumably conservative estimate that all those people have used the software to download at least one track, with a 50 euro cent wholesale value.
P2P litigation in Spain against individual file-sharers has not generally been successful because judges there say the country's copyright law only classify file-sharing as infringement if individuals profit from their sharing. The lawsuit against Soto claims that his company did profit from the provision of the P2P technology, which was supplied to consumers to enable them to share unlicensed music.
You might thing a so called 'contributory infringement' case (which is what this is, because Soto himself didn't host or distribute unlicensed music) may fail given that the people using the software are not themselves infringing under Spanish law. But there is some precedent in the record companies' favour, albeit from Italy. There, where a lack of 'commercial intent' also makes it hard to 'do' individual file-sharers for infringement, the owner of a BitTorrent tracker was successfully pursued through the courts for contributory infringement because he profited from aiding others to locate unlicensed content.
Commenting on the case, the boss of Spanish music business group Promusicae, Antonio Guisasola, told reporters: " is parasitical towards ours, and he is getting rich by doing it. He has created a tool for fraud, and for that he must be made responsible".
Speaking to reporters outside the Madrid court this week, Soto said he simply doesn't have the money to pay the kind of damages the labels are asking for, while adding the usual defence used by though accused of infringing by providing technology that helps others to file-share: "Technology is always neutral, and you cannot accuse the developer of a program because of the use made of it by its users".