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Plaintiff: Noun - A Person Who Brings A Case Against Another in A Court of Defendant: Noun - An Individual, Company, or Institution Sued or Accused

This case involved a lawsuit filed by various record companies against Napster for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the district court's ruling that Napster users were directly infringing on the plaintiffs' copyrights through their use of the Napster file sharing service. The court also rejected Napster's arguments that its users' activities constituted fair use. It found that Napster had knowledge of and materially contributed to the infringement, constituting contributory infringement. This was an important ruling regarding the application of copyright laws to peer-to-peer file sharing services.

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89 views4 pages

Plaintiff: Noun - A Person Who Brings A Case Against Another in A Court of Defendant: Noun - An Individual, Company, or Institution Sued or Accused

This case involved a lawsuit filed by various record companies against Napster for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the district court's ruling that Napster users were directly infringing on the plaintiffs' copyrights through their use of the Napster file sharing service. The court also rejected Napster's arguments that its users' activities constituted fair use. It found that Napster had knowledge of and materially contributed to the infringement, constituting contributory infringement. This was an important ruling regarding the application of copyright laws to peer-to-peer file sharing services.

Uploaded by

Ishwar
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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A&M Records, Inc. v Napster Inc.

(2001)

infringe: verb - actively


break the terms of (a law, agreement, etc.) :
making an unauthorized copy would infringe copyright.
plaintiff: noun - a person who brings a case against another in a court of
law
defendant: noun - an individual, company, or institution sued or accused
in a court of law

A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., 239 F.3d 1004 (2001) was a landmark
intellectual property case in which theUnited States Court of Appeals for the
Ninth Circuit affirmed the ruling of the United States District Court for the
Northern District of California, holding that defendant, peer-to-peer (P2P) file-
sharing service Napster, could be held liable for contributory infringement and
vicarious infringement of the plaintiffs' copyrights. This was the first major case to
address the application of copyright laws to peer-to-peer file-sharing.

Plaintiffs:
While the case is referred to as A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, the full list of
plaintiffs included a number of record companies, all members of the Recording
Industry Association of America (RIAA).

Defendant:
Napster was started in 1999 by Shawn Fanning, then an 18-year-old freshman
computer science student at Northeastern University. It provided a platform for
users to access and download compressed digital music files, specifically MP3s,
from other users' machines. Unlike many peer-to-peer services, however,
Napster included a central server that indexed connected users and files
available on their machines, creating a searchable list of music available across
Napster's network. Napster's ease of use compared to other peer-to-peer
services quickly made it a popular service for music enthusiasts to find and
download digital song files for free.

Direct infringement
The Circuit Court agreed with the district court's determination that Napster users
were probably engaging in direct infringement of plaintiffs' copyrights.
A&M Records, Inc. v Napster Inc. (2001)

Fair use defense


Turning to the question of fair use, the Circuit court agreed with the district court's
"general analysis of Napster system uses" as well as with its analysis of the three
"alleged fair uses identified by Napster" – which were "sampling, where users
make temporary copies of a work before purchasing; space-shifting, where users
access a sound recording through the Napster system that they already own in
audio CD format; and permissive distribution of recordings by both new and
established artists."
The court first considered these four factors on an abstract level of the system
itself.
! 1.! They agreed with the District Court's finding that downloading an MP3 is
not transformative under the purpose and character of use factor, and that
even though Napster didn't directly benefit financially from users'
downloads (i.e., charge for the service), "repeated and exploitative copying
of copyrighted works, even if the copies are not offered for sale" could be
considered a commercial use.
! 2.! The court also affirmed the district court's finding that creative works, such
as the songs in question, are "closer to the core" of intended copyright
protection" than non-creative works, thus favoring the plaintiffs on the
second factor.
! 3.! They considered the potential that in some cases, wholesale copying of a
work may be protected, noting time-shifting as an example.
! 4.! Finally, the Ninth Circuit agreed with the district court's finding that
widespread wholesale transfer of plaintiff's music negatively affected the
market for CD sales and that it also jeopardizes the record industry's future
in digital markets.
The court then turned to the three uses Napster identified as fair use in the
conduct of its users:
! 1.! sampling, where users make temporary copies of a work to sample it
before purchase, which the District Court found to be a commercial use
even if a user purchases the work at a later time. Sampling was deemed to
A&M Records, Inc. v Napster Inc. (2001)

not be a fair use, because the "samples" were in fact permanent and
complete copies of the desired media.
! 2.! space-shifting, where users access a sound recording through the Napster
system that they already own in audio CD format; here the District Court
found that neither of the shifting analyses used in the Sony or RIAA v.
Diamond Multimedia cases applied in this case because the "shifting" in
neither case included or enabled distribution. The space-shifting argument
did not succeed because, while the shift to a digital format may have been
a personal storage use, it was accompanied by making the file available to
the rest of the system's users.
! 3.! permissive distribution of recordings by both new and established artists
who have authorized their music to be disseminated in the Napster
system, which the District Court ruled was not an infringing use and could
continue, along with chat rooms and other non-distributory features of
Napster.
By contrast, the court found that the owners of Napster could control the
infringing behavior of users, and therefore had a duty to do so. The Ninth Circuit
affirmed this analysis, finding that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed in proving
that Napster did not have a valid fair use defense.

Contributory infringement
In order to prove contributory infringement, a plaintiff must show that a defendant
had knowledge of infringement (here, that Napster knew that its users were
distributing copyrighted content without permission across its network) and that
defendant supplied material support to that infringement.
Knowledge. The District Court ruled that the "law does not require knowledge of
'specific acts of infringement'" and rejected Napster's assertion that, because
they could not distinguish between infringing and non-infringing files, they did not
have knowledge of copyright infringement. The Ninth Circuit upheld this analysis,
accepting that Napster had "knowledge, both actual and constructive, of direct
infringement."
The Ninth Circuit also held that Napster was not protected under Sony Corp. of
America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., "the Betamax case", because of
A&M Records, Inc. v Napster Inc. (2001)

Napster's "actual, specific knowledge of direct infringement." "We are compelled


to make a clear distinction between the architecture of the Napster system and
Napster's conduct in relation to the operational capacity of the system."
! ▪! First, the Ninth Circuit acknowledged that it could not impute sufficient
knowledge to Napster "merely because peer-to-peer file sharing
technology may be used to infringe plaintiffs' copyrights." Paraphrased
Sony into its own words, the Ninth Circuit explained that if a defendant
"made and sold equipment capable of both infringing and substantial
noninfringing uses," that fact alone—i.e., "evidence that such machines
could be and were used to infringe plaintiffs' copyrighted television shows"
– would not be sufficient grounds to impute constructive knowledge to
defendants.
! ▪! The Court also assumed that Napster's software is "capable of
commercially significant noninfringing uses." This analysis differed from the
District Court's, which allowed "capable of" to be limited to the concrete
uses that Napster alleged were actually underway.
! ▪! Nevertheless, the Ninth Circuit found that, "Regardless of the number of
Napster's infringing versus noninfringing uses", the question could be
resolved on the basis of whether "Napster knew or had reason to know of
its users' infringement of plaintiffs' copyrights."
! ▪! The Ninth Circuit accepted that...
...Napster has actual knowledge that specific infringing material is available using its
system, that it could block access to the system by suppliers of the infringing material,
and that it failed to remove the material.

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