Free for a Fee

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For the last several months, I’ve been covering the tens of thousands of “John Doe” lawsuits brought against accused peer-to-peer movie swappers by the law firm of Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver. With so many developments and so many different cases, it can sometimes be hard for newcomers to the story to get a high-level overview of what’s going on—and why it matters.

Fortunately, National Public Radio’s On the Media is on the case. In this week’s episode, On the Media aired an interview between myself and host Bob Garfield

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The US Copyright Group, a business name for the group of Virginia lawyers filing suits against tens of thousands of alleged US peer-to-peer movie downloaders, has been sharply criticized by the EFF and ACLU for suing up to 5,000 anonymous defendants at once. The suits were “improperly joined,” said the groups. At least one of the federal judges overseeing these cases wanted to hear more, telling lawyers from Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver to convince her that all of the anonymous defendants had participated in the same transaction.

Yesterday, lawyer Tom Dunlap tried his hand at the task, filing a 29-page document in the Washington, DC District Court. According to Dunlap, suing 5,000 anonymous users at once is proper because of how BitTorrent works.

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LimeWire continues to take a beating from the music industry, as eight members of the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) have filed a new lawsuit against the company. The organization announced the lawsuit during its annual meeting in New York, saying that LimeWire facilitated “pervasive online infringement” and that it affected everyone in the music industry.

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For the last several years, the Center for Social Media at American University (directed by Pat Aufderheide) and the Program for Information Justice at the University law school (with which I’m affiliated) have been worked with various groups of practitioners (documentary filmmakers, media literacy educations, on-line video makers, providers of open courseware, dance archives, and others) to devise so-called Statements or Codes of Best Practices in fair use for those communities.

Some information about that effort can be found at http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/fair_use/. Now, thanks to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the Association of Research Libraries, we’ll be part of a team devising fair use standards for institutional collections of print and other media in support of teaching and scholarship.

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[Post by Venkat]

Facebook v. Power Ventures, Case No. 5:08-cv-05780 JW (N.D. Cal.) (Facebook Motion) (EFF Amicus Brief)

Facebook and Power Ventures have been locked in a dispute over whether Power Ventures can access Facebook’s website and network outside of Facebook’s authorized developer channels. The dispute yielded an interesting ruling on Power.com’s motion to dismiss. The parties are both seeking summary judgment on the issue of whether Power.com’s conduct violates California Penal Code section 502(c). EFF recently weighed in with an amicus brief which makes the already interesting dispute even more interesting.

The Dispute: Facebook brought Computer Fraud and Abuse Act claims and copyright claims (along with a slew of other claims) against Power.com. Setting aside the peripheral trademark and CAN-SPAM claims, Facebook’s key allegations are that (1) Power.com accessed Facebook’s network “without authorization” in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (and section 502(c), the California computer crime statute); (2) Power.com accessed Facebook’s network in violation of the Facebook terms of use; and (3) Power.com copied the copyrighted portions of the Facebook website in the process of allowing Facebook users to access Facebook through Power.com’s interface. (There’s also an anti-circumvention claim tied to the unauthorized copying claim.) The court denied Power.com’s motion to dismiss. (See coverage of the court’s initial ruling on Power.com’s motion to dismiss from Tom O’Toole, Jeff Neuburger, and Cyberlaw Cases.)

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The RIAA has asked the federal judge overseeing the LimeWire case to slap a permanent injunction on LimeWire until it can clean up its copyright troubles to the labels’ satisfaction. . . .

LimeWire was found liable for massive copyright infringement a few weeks back. Judge Kimba Wood’s ruling cited internal LimeWire documents showing a knowledge of all the infringement taking place through LimeWire’s software—and little done to stop it.

“In the weeks since this Court’s Order, what has Lime Wire done to try to halt or limit the infringement it has induced?” ask the RIAA lawyers. “The answer, from all appearances, is nothing.”

The RIAA now proposes that the judge shut down the service and forbid LimeWire from distributing its software or running advertising.

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