Napster Ruling Is Upheld
A federal appeals panel Monday gave record and film companies another piece of ammunition in their fight against online piracy, upholding a lower court order that shut down Napster Inc.’s free song-sharing service.
The ruling has little impact on Redwood City-based Napster, which has abandoned its free service in favor of one that pays labels and songwriters for each song copied.
But lawyers for the music industry say it could rein in other online systems, including Morpheus, Kazaa and Grokster.
The implication of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling is that all file-sharing services “have a continuing obligation to adapt to the technology that may be available” for protecting copyrighted material against illegal copying, said Cary Ramos, an attorney for the National Music Publishers Assn.
At issue was how far Napster had to go to stop users from making unauthorized copies of songs. U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel in San Francisco had issued a pretrial injunction against Napster in March 2001, but lawyers for the company and the music industry continued to fight over how strict that injunction should be.
Napster argued that Patel went too far, requiring the company to adopt new filtering technology that identified and blocked copyrighted songs from being shared.
That technology wasn’t consistent with Napster’s file-sharing system, and, according to Napster’s lawyers, the Court of Appeals had previously ruled that the company didn’t have to redesign its system to stop infringements.
A three-judge panel from the 9th Circuit disagreed, saying that “it was a proper exercise of the District Court’s supervisory authority to require the new filtering mechanism.”
The panel also endorsed Patel’s “zero tolerance” approach, requiring Napster to shut down its free service until it had made the new filters as effective as they could be.
Representatives of Morpheus, Kazaa and Grokster said the ruling didn’t apply to them because their systems aren’t like Napster’s.
Attorney Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has joined Morpheus’ defense, said, “We are not actually liable for copyright infringement.”
Michael Page, an attorney for Grokster, said, “I think our case is going to be on broader issues than on the minutiae of what sort of filtering technology should be used.”
But Russell Frackman, an attorney for the major record labels, said the new ruling made clear that every file-sharing system has to filter out items they’ve been told are copyrighted.
“I would think that the court’s language in terms of the requirement for filtering ... would apply to any [file-sharing] system equally,” Frackman said.
