Supremes on P2P, and other news

[unixronin]

As reported by the BBC among others, the Supreme Court has ruled that file-sharing companies are to blame for what users do with their software.  Lower court ruliings hinged upon, and preserved, the prior Supreme Court Sony Betamax decision which states that a manufacturer cannot be held liable for criminal use of a product with substantial non-infringing utility.  In that decision, the Supremes ruled that the majority of people using a video recorder for legal uses outweighs any illegal use.

But in this latest ruling the judges sets aside [sic] this precedent and the lower court decisions and means the makers of a technology have to answer for what people do with it if they use it to break the law.

  (Garbled syntax courtesy of the BBC.)

I don't know about anyone else, but it seems to me that this has possible bad implications for product-liability suits -- in particular, for the anti-gun lobby's tactic of trying to sue firearms manufacturers for criminal use of their products.

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Other news items:

• The US is adding 4,200 cells to existing prisons in Iraq and building a new prison from scratch in Sulaimaniya;
• The director of the Berlin Wall Monument at Checkpoint Charlie is trying to raise 36 million Euros to buy the land it stands on and preserve the memorial.  The memorial contains 1,065 crosses, each dedicated to someone who died fleeing East Germany.
• Meanwhile, Japan's Emperor Akihito is visiting Saipan to pay his respects at a memorial for Japanese war dead from the Second World War, the virst visit he has made to a WW2 memorial outside Japan.  Around 43,000 Japanese troops, 3,500 US troops, and 12,000 civilians died on Saipan during a month of heavy fighting in 1944.  It was a key US victory that placed the Japanese mainland within range of B-29s based on Saipan and neighboring Tinian.
• Two rival consortia bidding to run the European Gaileo satellite-navigation system have joined forces.  The system will orbit 30 satellites by the end of the decade, with the first test satellite due to launch in December on a Soyuz.
• And from the Bitmines' favorite integer, US researchers have created "zombie dogs" in the course of research to develop suspended animation for humans.  The dogs were revived via electric shock and pure oxygen after several hours of clinical death, spent at a body temperature of only 7°C with their blood replaced by saline solution and no brain activity or heartbeat, and showed no brain damage.

Comments

[fruitylips.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I wonder if the boys over at the BBC know that the text of these decisions is available online. In short, no, the SCOTUS didn't set aside the Sony decision. What it said was that you cannot claim the Sony safe harbor if there is evidence that you're encouraging illegal uses of the technology. The question of if you can be held liable if most of the usage of your technology is illegal, but you're not encouraging it is a split issue right now. Ginsberg, Rehnquist and Kennedy all say yes. Breyers, Stephens and O'Connor disagree. However, for the time being, it is not a settled question.

This ruling isn't much of a surprise. When I was at Napster in 2000, this was exactly the tack that we were taking. Napster did its damndest to promote the legal aspects of file sharing by encouraging bands to put up their own stuff for download. For a while, music owned by Orrin Hatch (he's a song writer) was available on Napster.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, the whole area's been a minefield from the start. My opinion of Napster has always been that while Shawn Fanning may have had some neat ideas technically, in the arena of making a viable business plan he gave every impression of being a drooling idiot.

The clarification does shed a rather different, and much more positive, light on the ruling.

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

An additional note about Tinian - it is my understanding that the Enola Gay (http://www.theenolagay.com/plane.html) was based there.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Both Enola Gay and Bocks Car flew out of Tinian, iirc.