Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr. Billy
Not to put all the misunderstanding on you gideon. It looks like you may have got your information from the earlier post by wootpr0n on the issue.
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Actually, I read the entire 30+ page decision a few weeks ago.
So what I said still stands.
Safe harbor ONLY applies if you are UNAWARE OF INFRINGING ACTIVITY. Once you become aware of infringing activity, you have to control it or you can become liable.
So Usenet wanted to say that they were UNAWARE, but then the RIAA wanted evidence of their hard drives + employee depositions to prove that they were fully AWARE. When they destroyed this evidence and sent their employees on trips, the judge had to sanction them. Otherwise Usenet would be able to make the argument under safe harbor provisions and the RIAA wouldn't have any evidence to refute that.
There was a lot of evidence that they were aware of the infringing activity including:
-Advertisments on their site that encouraged users to download music
-Advertisments about how they were better than Napster (and a court had ruled that Napster was engaged in copyright infringement)
-Usenet allocated a disproportionately higher amount of server space for music files and music groups, so that music files would be available for longer periods of time. Recall that Usenet providers delete the older posts every day to make space for newer stuff.
-In many cases, the employees were bragging via internal e-mail about the availability of infringing music
-In many cases, tech support was assisting Usenet subscribers to download infringing music files
-Usenet was aware that most of their users were downloading infringing music files, and they had server logs to demonstrate this fact
The RIAA was aware of all that evidence of all of these activities existed on the hard drives of their computers and servers and that Usenet employees could testify to this effect. So when Usenet destroyed the evidence, and then attempted to argue that they didn't know what was going on, the RIAA would not get a fair trial. That is why the judge sanctioned them, telling them that they cannot argue that they were unaware. This is supposed to level the playing field.
But of course, now the RIAA has practically no proof that anything happened. The RIAA can make the argument that there was infringing activity, and that Usenet knowingly contributed to it.
Usenet CAN'T make the argument that they didn't know about the infringing activities, but they CAN make the argument that the infringing activities never took place. And the RIAA doesn't have much proof.
If you must know, this judge (Harold Baer) crafted the decision like this on purpose. He has a history of hating lawyers, and copyright law, and especially police.