Court Rules LimeWire Infringed on Copyrights
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2010/05/limewireruling.pdf
The court ruled that LimeWire intended to “induce infringement” because:
(1) The massive scale of infringement committed by LimeWire users
(2) LimeWire knew about the massive scale of infringing users on their network
One item that was interesting to me was that the court determined that LimeWire’s response to the massive scale of infringement to be insufficient. There were company papers acknowledging the mass infringement, but also strategic plan to convert infringing users to customers of LimeWire’s online store (which would sell authorized music). It seems interesting to me that the strategic plan for conversion did not protect LimeWire and the court implies that knowledge of infringement along with insufficient response may place companies liable for infringement of copyright.
Additionally, the court ruled that LimeWire’s advertisement campaigns incited copyright infringement. However I think that these ad campaigns were very different than the slogans used by Grokster and Napster. In the previous cases, advertisements explicitly stated the copyrighted materials that could be downloaded (ie: the top 10 songs on the network etc). However, in the case of LimeWire, campaigns were designed to advertise the technical functionality of the application: “free music downloads”, “excellent for downloading music files”. Where the company faltered was in associating themselves with other infringement fostering programs (Napster, Morpheus, etc), however the there were explicit advertisements marketing LimeWire as a way to obtain copyrightable material for free. This is interesting because it is placing more pressure on companies: marketing of their products could be used against them if interpreted as promoting illegal activities.
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