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Source:Mashable!

Say you were to step back in time, to the moment before you were aware that copying and sharing music, either through tangible media or virtual transfer, was illegal - and could be a crime prosecutable with steep fines and perhaps even a jail term (if you happened to be convicted of particularly heavy violations). Would you prefer to see damages conditioned to fit considerably less intense profile? One described as “innocent infringement,” perhaps? That’s what the defendant in Maverick v. Harper is hoping to realize.

The case takes place in San Antonio court, and involves what originally was a 16 year old girl (now college age), who admitted to copyright infringement but has sought “‘innocent infringer’ status,” according to Ray Beckerman of the website Recording Industry vs The People.

The RIAA, according to Beckerman, aimed for summary judgment in light of the defendant’s plea of ignorance about her transgression(s). But interestingly enough, the court has “denied the RIAA’s motion…unless (it) agrees to accept $200 per infringement.”

That number is rather meaningful, actually. The court details its position thusly:

The damages provision of the Copyright Act provides that a plaintiff may elect to seek

minimum damages of $750 per work. 17 U.S.C. § 504(c)(1). However, it also provides that “where the infringer . . . was not aware and had no reason to believe that his or her acts constituted an infringement of copyright, the court in its discretion may reduce the award of statutory damages to a sum of not less than $200.” 17 U.S.C. § 504(c)(2). The defendant has the burden to prove the lack of intent necessary for innocent infringement.

The court then explained the defendants stated position on the matter:

Defendant admitted that she owned compact discs. However, both in her affidavit and in her deposition, Defendant claimed that she believed using KaZaA and similar products to be akin to listening to radio over the internet and did not know that the Recordings were being either downloaded or distributed. She further claimed that prior to this lawsuit, she did not have any understanding of copyright infringement.

Insofar as the defendant’s need to “prove the lack of intent necessary for innocent infringement,” the court had this to say:

At the summary judgment stage, all factual disputes must be construed in the light most favorable to the non-moving party—in this case, Defendant. Anderson, 477 U.S. at 255. Defendant has the burden of proving by a preponderance of the evidence that her actions constituted innocent infringement. 17 U.S.C. § 502(c)(2). Plaintiffs have not introduced any evidence to contradict that Defendant did not have an understanding of the nature of file-sharing programs and copyright sophisticated enough to have reason to know that her actions infringed Plaintiffs’ copyrights. Therefore, the Court finds that a fact issue exists as to whether Defendant was an innocent infringer.

There you have it. A lesser charge for the defendant, it seems. But I must say, even with the -$550 “voucher” put up by the court, $200 per work still puzzles me. If we’re to take $0.99 as the generally accepted price for a digital music track today, a 2,000% premium is peculiarly high for an infraction. Yes, the real damages to the RIAA could be quite high, given the amount of illegal proliferation of music on the Web. But one could perhaps just as convincingly argue the opposite. That they are not so high on an individual basis. As it goes in the peer-to-peer realm, the number of seeders, like leechers, is high. Given the fact that there is room for “doubt,” as it were, at least in a legal sense, damages could do with a major decrease. All the more so if a defendant is judged an “innocent infringer.”

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Source:Mashable!

If you are a Windows user and follow any of the vast number of blogs that specialize in talking about Microsoft and Windows chances are you will have heard about Long Zheng and his istartedsomething.com blog. Long has been blogging for quite sometime about both and has acquired quite the reputation for breaking stories that have to do with Microsoft and its operating system. The great thing about this is that he is still going to school full time while he builds what could end up being a very successful Web business along side his already popular blog.

It all came about nearly six months ago when on what was originally just a whim he created the first version of his Windows UX Taskforce web site. The idea was simple enough – to provide a single place where people could document the problems they were finding with the user interface in Vista. In a very short time the site became very popular with Windows users and apparently caught the eye of Microsoft employees on the Windows team. The site became so popular that Long then revamped it to provide a more robust reporting system for the users of the site as well as recoding the whole backend with an eye to the future.

Recently he changed the name from Windows UX Taskforce to Areo Taskforce and is in the process of redoing the graphics to better resemble the Vista interface colors and style. He is doing this because just recently at the behest of many Mac users he has created the same Taskforce site for Mac users – appropriately enough called Aqua Taskforce. As Long said in the post announcing the new service:

One of the first requests I received after launching the Windows UX Taskforce was “when can you make one for Mac OS X.” This came at a surprise to me because I didn’t know OS X had user experience flaws, but apparently it did and still do. Having said that today I’m proud to launch Aqua Taskforce, a taskforce site for Apple users to submit, vote and comment on OS X user experience quirks.

While it might still be early days for his Aqua Taskforce site it is already beginning to see items being added. Now whether the site will see the same involvement from the Mac OS team at Apple as the Area Taskforce does from Microsoft remains to be seen, but hopefully they will be paying attention.

As Long noted in his announcement post about the Aqua Taskforce site, he has completely revamped the back-end code so that even a single log-on will work for both sites. It also has been re-engineered so that the codebase can support multiple task-force sites with a single log-on as well.

This is were the accidental success could be something that Long Zheng didn’t anticipate. With this re-engineering he has created a backend to a system that will allow him to deploy any new taskforce site in literally minutes. So any company that would find something like this useful could be up and running with their own task-force site minutes after contacting Long.

Literally out of a single idea Long has utilized the power of the Web to provide easy to launch services and built himself what could be a nice profitable business – and he’s still in school. It is amazing how sometimes such a simple idea that would seem to be out of the norm of what we expect a web business to be these days can with some imagination take off.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, August 10th, 2008 at 5:35 pm and is filed under blogger, apple, taskforce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.