On Tue, 15 Oct 1996, The Devil made Mark O. Aldrich write:
On Tue, 15 Oct 1996, Matthew Ghio wrote:
Also, SPA is going after C2 because one of their customers allegedly had a link to a pirate site - but they have (apparently) not gone after the pirate site itself! Could someone explain to me how there can be a finding of contributory copyright infringement, when there is no direct copyright infringement? <snip>
The SPA isn't going to go after pirate sites because they're operated by kids in basements who've got no money. C2 has money. The SPA likes money. SPA sues C2. (I'm sure there's some formal sentential logic that someone can post that will state this in even more succinct terms.)
Allow me to play the fool here for a minute. If I really wanted to put up a site which held copyrighted material available for download on the web or via FTP, I could do it using two semi-anonymous accounts, a crontab entry, and the anonymous remailer network. Since finding me, personally in the first place would be difficult at best, and three doors down from impossible if I really tried... Wouldn't it make sense to go after whoever my enemies could get to? Watch the movie "The Usual Suspects". When Kaiser Solce wanted to get at his enemies, he killed their friends, business associates, anyone who owed them money, their families, etc... A site to which no one makes any links soon becomes an abandoned site. Perhaps this is the "Deep Pockets Rule" at it's finest. If you can't get action from your enemy directly, attack his allies. Whether they knew they were allied against you or not is irrelevant. Or maybe I've had too many beers. --- "Obviously, the US Constitution isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than what we have now." - Unknown PGP key id - 0xDEACDFD1 - Full key available from pgp-public-keys@pgp.mit.edu