More P2P nonsense, and a possibly important ruling in the New York courts to strengthen the record companies' legal argument against individual file sharers, should they wish to have such an argument.
As previously reported, the Recording Industry Association Of America has pursed a huge number of lawsuits against individuals who illegally share unlicensed content online. In the main the people they target in these lawsuits normally settle straight away, but in a handful of cases the defendant mounts a defence, normally employing one legal technicality or another.
One such defendant is Tenise Barker, who said in her defence that all the record companies had proven was that she put tracks into a folder on her computer, and gave access to that folder to others via a P2P client - in her case good old Kazaa. Her lawyers argued that that act in itself did not amount to infringement, because moving digital tracks into a folder on a PC does not infringe one of the 'rights' awarded to copyright owners by US copyright laws, ie the exclusive rights to reproduce, distribute, perform or display the content to the public (moving the files, they argued, didn't amount to any of those things).
Barker's people asked to have the claim against her dismissed on the grounds infringement hadn't been proven. It was an optimistic defence, but had the courts chosen, like Barker's lawyers, to interpret US copyright law so narrowly it would have thrown a spanner in the works for the RIAA, whose evidence in many P2P lawsuits is the fact people have simply placed unlicensed music in a folder accessible to others via Kazaa.
Fortuitously, for the labels, not Barker, the court chose not to interpret US law that way. The Court said that the current law could be interpreted so that Barker's actions amounted to infringement, though it added that the labels, in their lawsuit, had expressed the infringement in the wrong way. Judge Kenneth Karas said that the labels' legal papers should allege that a defendant "made an offer to distribute, and that the offer to distribute was for the purpose of further distribution, public performance, or public display".
Despite the bad wording, Karas let the lawsuit stand, because there were other allegations of infringement in the claim that did not rely on the Kazaa folder. The labels were also given 30 days to fix the wording of their lawsuit using the judge's guidelines.