Jari Ketola
1 Jul 2003 14:19
A U.S. appeals court upheld the injunction against the peer-to-peer service Madster (formely known as Aimster). According to the court not Madster nor it's owner John Deep cannot escape liability simply by claiming that the traffic on the network could not be monitored due to, for example, encryption.
RIAA was pleased by the decision, and sees that it puts the previous decision in the case against Grokster and Morpheus in a new light. In April a motion for summary judgement was denied on the basis that both services have legitimate, non-infringing uses. There's little doubt that RIAA will be using this ruling as an argument when demanding the District Court to re-consider RIAA's motion.
However mr. Deep also concidered the ruling a victory, since it outlined a series of tests the service should meet in order to continue. One of those tests, for instance, was to prove that people use the service for legitimate purposes, like exchanging non-copyrighted music files.