E-Commerce Legal Questions
from the the-downfall-of-the-new-economy? dept
An interesting column that ties together a recent lawsuit against eBay for having fraudulent material for sale and the Metallica/Napster situation. Are these companies that are only acting as a conduit at fault? If so, what does that mean for the economy and all these dot coms? It's only a little scary that we're leaving this up to the courts to decide. However, no matter what they decide, technology has a way of getting around ridiculous barriers set up by folks who don't know what they're talking about.
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A Conduit for What?
What's Napster a conduit for? Sharing music files. Notice I didn't say "illegally sharing music files." That will be for the courts to decide, but if they do decide that "illegally" is an accurate description (and I'm not suggesting that they should), then Napster should be liable, too.
What's an ISP a conduit for? Anything and everything that can be communicated via IP. Unless there's something intrinsically illegal (or even regulatable) about IP packets then an ISP shouldn't have to bear any responsibility for the information contained in those packets.
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Re: A Conduit for What?
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Re: A Conduit for What?
I'm not as familiar with Napster, so I may be wrong here, but doesn't it make your MP3 download directory available to any other Napster user? In that sense they've decided to dictate the terms for sharing files and should bear some responsibility for that. FTP is a file sharing tool, too, but running an ftp client doesn't automatically publish my home directory contents to the world.
It took a court battle to decide it, but eventually it was recognized that VCR's had enough legitimate uses to offset their potential misuse. Does Napster really have any legitimate use? Think about that for a second -- if you have to jump through hoops to use Napster legally and/or there are other tools that do the legal things easier and better, then those uses don't count. It doesn't sound like I could use it to facilitate any personal fair-use copying of copyrighted material (such as sharing my CD's between home and work) because it would expose those tracks to illegal copying, and there seem to be better ways to search for and download freely-distributable music.
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