Win for the People
A friend just pointed me to a really interesting development in the fight against RIAA. Apparently William and Mary stood up to their John Doe subpoenas and the judge actually threw the case out. A quick snippet follows, the full article can be found here, as I'm about to go to sleep.
"Plaintiffs' motion and accompanying brief neglect to mention that Congress provided a framework for subpoenas to identify internet infringers in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act 'DMCA'), specifically 17 U.S.C. § 512(h)," wrote the judge. "Section 512 of the DMCA establishes safe harbor provisions for four categories of internet service providers ('ISP') based on the function which the ISP performs with respect to the infringing material—'transmitting it per § 512(a), caching it per § 512(b), hosting it per § 512(c), or locating it per § 512(d).'"
And in English....
In order for a subpoena to be issued under the DMCA, according to Judge Kelley, the record labels must first issue a DMCA takedown notice to the ISP: in this case, William and Mary. However, since the college did not host, cache, or transmit the music in question, there's no place for a takedown notice... and no room for a subpoena to be issued.
What does this mean? It means William and Mary is safe for students. I'm not condoning piracy, but this means that if, for instance, your computer was trojaned, and used to download media which is entirely possible, the students wouldn't be out on their own!
Of course, any good dark net would try to recruit a student or two on that campus to be their go to person for new music, or just install proxies on some select computers, but that is neither here, nor there.
