At 10:51 PM -0400 8/16/04, CBS MarketWatch wrote:

NOT IN THE CARDS

Credit card companies may have one less thing to worry about online: being held liable for copyright infringements by customers, even when said activity involves a card transaction.

So ruled U.S. District Judge James Ware, freeing Visa, MasterCard and other payment-related defendants from having to take responsibility for sales of images pirated from Perfect 10, an adult entertainment venture in Beverly Hills, Calif.

Perfect 10 had sued the payment processors in an effort to recoup the proceeds from unauthorized sales of Perfect 10's copyrighted material.

"The ability to process credit cards does not directly assist the allegedly infringing Web sites in copying plaintiff's works," Ware said in a ruling handed down last week. "Defendants do not provide the means for distributing those works to others, nor do they provide bandwidth or storage space with which to transfer or store the works."

-- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'