According to a 10/10/96 press release, the Software Publishers Association has files copyright infringement suits against three ISP's and two individual users. The three ISP's were Community Connexion of Oakland, GeoCities of Beverly Hills, and Tripod of Williamstown, Mass. The two users sued were apparently customers of other ISP's who turned over their names & contact information to the SPA. The press release, located at <http://www.spa.org/piracy/releases/netpir.htm>, indicates: "Piracy has taken many forms on the Internet. These include making unauthorized copies of software available for download, the posting of serial numbers, cracker and hacker utilities and links to pirate FTP sites. Although many believe piracy is limited to "warez" or illegal copies of software, it extends beyond that narrow definition. Under the law, anyone who knows -- or should have known -- of the infringement and who assists, encourages or induces the infringement is liable for indirect infringement. In each of the actions SPA filed, at least two of the above infringements were present. " The SPA has apparently adopted two relatively aggressive litigation strategies - putting ISP's in the position of disclosing otherwise confidential customer information or being sued themselves, and treating peripheral data about copyrighted works like copyrighted works themselves (e.g., serial numbers). Particularly interesting is that they seem to be claiming that a *link* to a pirate FTP site is itself infringing (potentially contributory infringement). (My comments above are made solely from reading the press release.) It's inappropriate to expect Sameer or any other C2 employee/agent/representative to discuss the suit before they've had a chance to find and meet with an attorney; in some circumstances it might never be prudent for them to make a public statement about the suit. But it certainly couldn't hurt for people who've thought about signing up with C2 to do so now as a show of support, nor for existing users to renew their service early. -- Greg Broiles | "We pretend to be their friends, gbroiles@netbox.com | but they fuck with our heads." http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | |