A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc.

-! bgcolor="6699FF" | Case opinions
- |
-! bgcolor="6699FF" | Laws applied
-
--- "A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc.", 239 F.3d 1004 (9th Cir. 2001)ref|citation, was an important intellectual property case in which the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the defendant, Napster, could be held liable for contributory infringement of the plaintiff record company's copyrights. The court also rejected the suggestion that it impose a compulsory licensing arrangement on the plaintiff record company. This was the first major case to address the application of the copyright laws to peer-to-peer file-sharing.

Facts

The defendant, Napster, was a company started in 1999 by Shawn Fanning, then an 18-year old freshman computer-science student at Boston's Northeastern University (Boston, Massachusetts)
Northeastern University. It provided a platform for users to upload and download music files in a compressed digital format. The plaintiffs were major record companies who saw the potential for this technology to impact their sales, and quickly filed suit against Napster as a "contributory and vicarious copyright infringer." The United States District Court found that Napster had contributed to the infringement of copyrights owned by the plaintiffs, and issued an injunction, from which Napster appealed.

In order for Napster to be liable for contributory infringement, the users of the service had to be infringing directly. Napster asserted that this was not the case, but that a substantial number of its users were in fact engaged in three kinds of fair use:
# "sampling", where users make temporary copies of a work before purchasing;
# "space-shifting", where users access a sound recording through the Napster system that they already own in audio CD format; and
# "permissive distribution" of recordings by both new and established artists

Issue

The issue presented to the Ninth Circuit was whether the asserted uses were in fact "fair use." The court was also confronted with the question of a solution for the alleged infringement, to which Napster had proposed a compulsory license.

Result

The Ninth Circuit found that "Napster users infringe at least two of the copyright holders' exclusive rights: the rights of reproduction, § 106(1); and distribution, § 106(3)." With respect to the fair use arguments, the court sharply distinguished the facts presented from "the Betamax case", "Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc." 464 U.S. 417 (1984), where the manufacturers of VCRs had no control over how people used them after they were purchased. By contrast, the court found that the owners of Napster could control the infringing behavior of users, and therefore had a duty to do so. Sampling was deemed to not be a fair use, because the "samples" were in fact permanent and complete copies of the desired media. Furthermore, the space-shifting argument did not avail the defendant, because the shift to a digital format was not a personal storage use, but was accompanied by sharing the file with the rest of the world.

The court also rejected Napster’s proposed compulsory royalty, calling that an "easy out" for Napster, and contending that the imposition of such a device would destroy the plaintiffs' ability to control their intellectual property.

Chilling effect

This "Napster Ruling" has henceforth frequently been cited as legal precedent imposing threat of liability (chilling effect) against website authors for merely hyperlinking to copyrighted content. As the Copyright Act of 1976 automatically copyrights all works "set in a tangible medium" (e.g. an HTML file), any online work not specifically licensed otherwise (e.g. Creative Commons, GFDL) becomes copyrighted by its author(s). Thus, the very nature of the World Wide Web and the Internet protocol suite necessitate contributory copyright infringement. Whether linking to any particular copyrighted work constitutes contributory infringement or fair use continues to be judged in court on a case-by-case basis.

imilar cases

JASRAC and IFPI Taiwan [ [http://www.ifpi.org.tw/activity/act_index.htm IFPI TAIWAN-財團法人國際唱片業交流基金會] ] brought legal actions to some P2P softwares after the case. [ [http://www.venus.dti.ne.jp/~inoue-m プログラム関連判決集] ] [ [http://www.netlaw.co.jp/hanrei/index.html Netlaw] ] [ [http://www31.ocn.ne.jp/~jucccopyright/ 日本ユニ著作権センター(JUCC)] ] [ [http://www.ncu.edu.tw/~mlwang/course/cyberlaw2005f/index.b5.html Cyberlaw / ITL, NCTU / Fall, 2004] ] [ [http://www.tipo.gov.tw/eng TIPO] ] . Winny and Filerouge [ [http://www.filerogue.net Confession of filerouge] ] closed down in Japan. Ezpeer [ [http://web.ezpeer.com/ ezPeer+ 音樂下載、歌詞、MP3、音樂網] ] won the case with IFPI Taiwan, but like Honey(formerly the kupeer) [ [http://kupeer.com Honey----入口網站] ] , kuro [ [http://www.kuro.com.tw 創聯網:::Kuro:::行動娛樂] ] are legal music download now. Azpeer closed down.

Reference

Further reading

* cite journal | last = Landes | first = William | authorlink = | coauthors = Lichtman, Douglas | year = 2003 | month = | title = Indirect Liability for Copyright Infringement: "Napster" and Beyond | journal = Journal of Economic Perspectives | volume = 17 | issue = 2 | pages = 113–124 | doi = 10.1257/089533003765888467 | url = | accessdate = | quote =

External links

* [http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/~wseltzer/napster.html Text of the opinion from the website of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit]
* [http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/106.html 17 U.S.C. § 106]