Court rejects piracy claims against P2P file-sharing networks
Posted on Friday, August 20 2004 @ 21:29:38 CEST by Lordrazer
federal appeals court in the US has declared that the online file-sharing software companies are not liable to copyright infringement charges.
The US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favour of StreamCast, Grokster and other file-sharing software companies yesterday, while saying that software companies are not responsible for what the users do with their peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. The three-judge panel reportedly said that the structure of the P2P networks made it impossible for the software companies to exert any control over the users. The court ruled that the file-sharing networks should not be outlawed because of the significant legal applications associated with them, while giving a precedent of a previous battle of the movie studios against the video cassette recorders (VCRs) in the 1980s.
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