Friday, June 06, 2008 The Napster infringement case By Clint Fabiosa & Andrew Ong I.Protect
IN 1999, Shawn Fanning, an 18-year old freshman computer-science student, founded a company called Napster Inc., which provided a platform for users to upload and download music files in a compressed digital format.
A case was filed against him by major record companies in the United States for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement.
In order for Napster to be liable for contributory infringement, the users of the service had to be infringing directly.
Napster asserted that this was not the case, but that a substantial number of its users were in fact engaged in three kinds of fair use–sampling, space-shifting and permissive distribution.
The US Supreme Court ruled that Napster is guilty of contributory infringement.
Napster users infringe at least two of the copyright holders’ exclusive rights: the rights of reproduction and distribution.
Unlike the earlier Betamax case, owners of Napster could control the infringing behavior of users.
Sampling was deemed not to be fair use, because the “samples” were in fact permanent and complete copies of the desired media.
Furthermore, the shift to a digital format was not personal storage use, but was accompanied by sharing the file with the rest of the world. (A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., 239 F.3d 1004 (9th Cir. 2001).
