Copyright Infringement Cases

[rber]

I was talking to a friend today and we couldn't figure out if people were getting sued for just sharing music/movies or if they were being sued for downloading them.

Can anyone shed some light on this?

[tokenuser]

I was talking to a friend today and we couldn't figure out if people were getting sued for just sharing music/movies or if they were being sued for downloading them.

Can anyone shed some light on this?What is the difference? Electronic download vs burning a disc and trading?

[masherscf]

I was talking to a friend today and we couldn't figure out if people were getting sued for just sharing music/movies or if they were being sued for downloading them.

Can anyone shed some light on this?

The case law is public. Do some research, baby. You're local library probably has all the resources you need.

[rber]

Is it online or is there a database I'd have to look it up in?

[masherscf]

Is it online or is there a database I'd have to look it up in?

Normally, legal indexes aren't free. Law firms and libraries spend a lot of money for access to them. It's sort of a barrier to entry that's maintained by the legal industry. There's no motivation for people to hire lawyers if they had access to this stuff.

Search around, you're looking for Lexis-Nexis. I bet you can access the law suit filings for most of the RIAA lawsuits. I bet they're all boilerplate though.

I makes sense that, for the RIAA to pursue one person, the claim has to be worth pursuing. That means they have to document the infringement in perhaps hundreds or even thousands of instances. This requires the RIAA agents to have access to you're entire library of shared material. This is only possible if you are actively sharing those files. It is unlikely that the RIAA would actually be able to track the downloads to a single user with some sort of targeted effort. However, if the user helps them out by broadcasting their shared files, It's much easier to build a case.