James Delahunty
29 Dec 2004 16:50
President of InternetMovies.com Inc, Michael Jay Rossi plans to ask the United States Supreme Court to review the case "Rossi vs. Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)" for the wrongful shutdown of his site in 2001. The Ninth Circuit Court ruled that good faith belief under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is subjective and not objective. In 2001 the MPAA claimed that InternetMovies.com had The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King available for download, which was not even finished production until 2003. The MPAA sent a cease and desist letter to the site's ISP demanding that it be shut down.
"MPAA communications with my ISP were unreasonable and outrageous and without just cause or excuse and beyond all bounds of decency -- violating the DMCA. The courts must have overlooked that I could not have made a movie downloadable 3 years in the future, which shows that the MPAA was not within the boundaries of decency and that the court should not have ruled in favor of the MPAA." said Rossi. First Amendment litigator James H. Fosbinder, who is representing Rossi, said InternetMovies.com never had the capacity to provide movie downloads and characterized the statements cited by the court as "hyperbole."
The MPAA should have purchased a membership and determined whether movies were in fact available for download before invoking the protections of the DMCA, the attorney said. He added that the membership price was about $3.00, and analogized the MPAA's tactic to seeking suppression of a book based on its cover without buying or reading it.
Sources:
ArriveNet
InternetMovies.com