One of the 20,000 or so victims of the RIAA war against its members' best customers has just succeeded in getting an order for attorney's fees.
This is unusual in the USA and will be an important precedent - unless the RIAA successfully appeals.
More detail here from Jon Newton.
Bravo to her attorney, Marilyn Barringer-Thomson of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and to Ray Beckerman for his role in defending various victims and maintaining a great blog all about the war here.
HK
I am wondering if liability would be similar in Canada. The whole question of not knowing about the infringement seems to be discussed often: what if someone deliberately doesn't want to know, such as people who set up their Wireless networks to be open so they can then claim any infringing activity was some unknown neighbour?
ReplyDeleteI'm of two minds on this. I don't think that innocent people should be dragged into lawsuits, but I also don't think that deliberately misconfiguration network equipment should be able to become a way to avoid any liability. For technical people if you flip the questionable traffic from copyright infringement (which they see as de minimus) to SPAM (which some go as far as wanting to be criminal) they tend to see the issue a bit differently.