New media companies are being sued by old media companies because the old media companies bought the laws that made what the new media companies are doing illegal ...
just like how the old media companies were sued by older companies like Kodak who paid to have the laws make the recording industry illegal...
When companies like LimeWire or BitTorrent become multi-Billion dollar corporations, they will pay to have copyright law rewritten in such a way to prevent the next generation of competitors.
Can someone explain why the CEO was held 'personally liable'?[1] Whenever companies behave like (at best) like dipshits, I've only ever seen 'the corporation is a person' and hence liable. Why single out the CEO personally in this one? Is this at the judge's discretion?
Im not sure I understand how LimeWire is liable, sure they offer the software, but the infringement is done by their users and not the company themselves
If you know that your users are infringing copyrights, as Limewire surely does, and you facilitate that copyright infringement, as Limewire arguably does by providing P2P software principally to copyright infringers (as does seems empirically to be the case), and your product has little other purpose outside of copyright infringement (unlike, say, BitTorrent by itself), and you receive direct financial benefit from the actions of infringers, as Limewire does by charging ~$35 for their software, then you are exposed to a bunch of different vectors for indirect copyright infringement.
This is not a particularly complicated legal area, except to the extent that it necessarily skirts a bunch of grey areas in copyright law.
I think the fact that a strong portion of their traffic is infringement is pretty damning on liability. While some people will use LimeWire for innocent behavior, or BitTorrent, let's face it, they was developed pretty much to facilitate infringement, gained their fame aiding infringement, and stayed afloat by aiding infringement.
I think the RIAA and MPAA are abhorrent, but I mean... you really don't see how they are liable? Just because they are slime doesn't mean people who infringe on their property rights are magically legally absolved.
Right, but look at how many other companies have lost in the courts, under similar circumstances. It isn't as though precedents have not already been set. The arguments about what users do with software are fine and well until you're on the receiving end of a multi-million dollar judgment.
I'm thinking this might be more like head shops. They sell water pipes that are surely used almost exclusively for illegal activities but can be used for non-illegal activities (i.e. smoking tobacco). I don't recall the head shops being asked to produce an actual example of a person smoking tobacco through one of their water pipes, how does this differ exactly?
New media companies are being sued by old media companies because the old media companies bought the laws that made what the new media companies are doing illegal ...
just like how the old media companies were sued by older companies like Kodak who paid to have the laws make the recording industry illegal...
When companies like LimeWire or BitTorrent become multi-Billion dollar corporations, they will pay to have copyright law rewritten in such a way to prevent the next generation of competitors.
See, it's a cycle.