THE DEATH OF COPYRIGHT
July’s cause celebre was undoubtedly the legal
battle in the US between Napster – a website that allows users to swap and download MP3 music files – and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
In late July, US District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel issued a preliminary injunction that would have required Napster to close down its MP3 file download service. Two days later, on 28 July, the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco granted a temporary reprieve and put the case on its expedited schedule.
Napster had to submit a brief to the court by 18 August and the plaintiffs must submit a reply by 8 September, so the case should receive a full hearing by late September or early October and could be in the US Supreme Court by the end of the year. The Wall Street Journal said
the Napster case and the related litigation is causing many content and intellectual property owners to worry if “the death of copyright is at hand”.
The RIAA was originally claiming damages of $100,000 (£66,200) per infringement, with an estimated total liability of $100m (£66.2m). But it is now expected that the recording industry will seek punitive damages of $150,000 (£99,300) per “wilful infringement”.
Napster also faces two suits, brought by Doctor Dre and Metallica, which are each claiming $10m (£6.2m) in damages. According to legal documents, Napster was valued at just $63m (£41.7m) in its most recent round of venture capital funding.
HELLO RIP – BYE-BYE CIVIL LIBERTY?
After spending most of the summer being mauled by critics during its committee stage in the House of Lords, the Government’s controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIP) finally made it to the statute book in July.
Some last-minute concessions eased some of the internet service provider (ISP) industry’s worries. For example, ISPs will be reimbursed a “fair” amount of the cost of installing black box e-mail monitoring systems and the Government is obliged to create an independent technical advisory board to oversee the system.
But fresh controversy was promptly stirred up at the beginning of August, when the Department of Trade and Industry published a consultation paper giving the industry until 25 August to respond to new regulations that restrict the rights of companies to monitor employees’ e-mail.
The new rules, which are scheduled to come into effect in October (they could clash with a proposed new data protection code on the same subject), will limit the power of employers to monitor staff e-mail without consent or “reasonable grounds” for believing they have consent. The exceptions are: to detect and prevent crime; to prevent unauthorised access to a system to stop hacking or the spread of viruses; and to establish the existence of facts to ensure regulatory compliance or to provide an audit trail for commercial transactions.