Judges rule file-sharing software legal

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The NET Act

The No Electronic Theft Act of 1997 made it a crime to copy more than $1000 worth of material in any 180 day period even if there was no money changing hands. That put a sort of bag limit on the downloading, i.e. copy up to $999 each half year and not break the law.

There is a question as to what constitutes a price for material, but with tunes now going legally for $0.99 at Apple and half of that elsewhere, it seems like 166 tunes a month is on solid ground and maybe as many as 332 or so could be brought in under the wire.

Now that's a lot of tunes to be downloading and, for all practical purposes, makes it "legal" in terms of violations of federal law to download.

Of course the record labels aren't stopping there. They are asserting that they are "damaged" by an individual's downloading on the somewhat shakey premise that the individual would have otherwise purchased the material had it not been downloaded. That has to be proven in court, of course, and the RIAA has yet to show up for an actual case based on these complaints.

They try to scare the consumers with vague threats of essentially unlimited liability and obtain a thousand or two bucks in settlement, but that is a pathetic, bottom feeding tactic that is itself a violation of the rules of court and laws of most states know as "abuse of process" or barratry. The RIAA will be held to account some day on these, I am sure.

Posted by: StorageGuru   Posted on: 08/19/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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