Judge in Internet music sharing case may grant new trial
[Quote:]
The judge in a landmark music copyright infringement award against a Brainerd woman notified attorneys today that he’s considering granting a new trial on the grounds that he improperly instructed the jury about what constitutes illegal file-sharing on the internet.
U.S. District Judge Michael Davis said in an order filed this morning in Minneapolis that he may have made a “manifest error of law” last October when he instructed a Duluth jury that simply uploading songs to a music file-sharing network could be considered illegal distribution, even in the absence of proof that anyone received them.
Usually it’s a company “MediaSentry” that “finds” copyright violators. MediaSentry (let’s ignore that they don’t have a license to conduct investigations in most states) probably has permission from the copyright owner to download the files. For the purpose of copyright infringement, the fact that the other party had permission would limit your liability to “making available” instead of actually creating an unauthorized copy, which would make it very difficult for the RIAA to prove that somebody who wasn’t authorized to download the materials did so. So this decision by the judge may have a big effect on the case.