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Legal
File-sharing case rejects privacy and fair use defences
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 6 May 2010
So, the Recording Industry Association Of America may have officially stopped suing the fans, but some lawsuits are still working their way through the system. And that has led to clarification from the Second US Circuit Court Of Appeals as to whether or not privacy or fair use laws can be used to fight off file-sharing lawsuits in America. They can’t.
According to Wired, a student from the State University of New York at Albany tried to fight an RIAA lawsuit first by claiming that his college revealing his identity to the record industry infringed his constitutional privacy rights (via the First Amendment), and then by claiming the relatively modest file-sharing of which the RIAA had evidence was covered by the ‘fair use’ provisions of US copyright law.
But both arguments failed. The court recently ruled: “To the extent that anonymity is used to mask copyright infringement or to facilitate such infringement by other persons, it is unprotected by the First Amendment”.
Although the privacy issues around labels and/or internet service providers snooping on people file-sharing have been raised before, the obligation of the latter to reveal the identities of suspected file-sharers to the former, when ordered to do so by a court, has not been overly controversial. For a short while in the US, ISPs even had to provide such information without a court order, due to some disagreement regarding what the Digital Millennium Copyright Act really said on the issue.
