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update A federal appeals court on Friday handed a major setback to the record industry's legal strategy of tracking down and suing alleged file swappers.
Reversing a series of decisions in favor of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Washington, D.C., court said copyright law did not allow the group to send out subpoenas asking Internet service providers for the identity of file swappers on their networks. The ruling came in favor of Verizon Communications, the first ISP to challenge the recording industry's actions.
"We are not unsympathetic either to the RIAA's concern regarding the widespread infringement of its members' copyrights, or to the need for legal tools to protect those rights," the court wrote. "It is not the province of the courts, however, to rewrite (copyright law) in order to make it fit a new and unforeseen Internet architecture, no matter how damaging that development has been to the music industry."
While it is a blow to the recording industry, Friday's decision is unlikely to derail the RIAA's ongoing lawsuits against hundreds of individual file-swappers. The ruling focuses on the unconventional subpoena power that the organization had claimed in order to seek ISP subscribers' identities and did not address the legality of the lawsuits that have already been filed.
Posted by Muddy at December 19, 2003 04:55 PM | TrackBack