A&M Records,Inc. Vs Napster, Inc.

On 2nd October 2000, A list of plaintiffs including 18 records companies which also the members of Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed a lawsuit against Napster, Inc. for contributory infringement and vicarious infringement of the plaintiff's copyrights. A&M Records, Inc. was listed as the main plaintiff in this case. This became a landmark intellectual property case when the court ruled against Napster, Inc and napster was ordered to shut down in July 2001 in order to comply with the injunction.

Case Background

Napster was founded as pioneer in peer-to-peer file sharing internet service that gain massive popularity as a way to sharing audio files, typically musics in MP3 format. The popularity of napster and its nature of business by sharing copyrighted musics has raise the ire of Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) who took issue with the large-scale distribution of their copyrighted music and sued Napster, Inc. for direct, contributory, and vicarious infringement of copyright in order to protect their intellectual property.

Outcomes

The court ruled against Napster as mentioned earlier.

Defence

Fair Use - is a defence to infringement codified at 17 U.S.C. § 107 which mentioned that infringing activities are permitted if pursued for purposes such as education, research, news reporting, comment, scholarship, etc..... The courts is to consider the following factors when determining whether the defence is met in a particular case:-

1. The purpose and character of the use, whether it is use for a commercial nature or is for non-profit educational purpose;
2. The nature of copyrighted work;
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in the relation of the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Reasoning

• Napster platform allows repeated and exploitative copying activites but no sales or any profit was gained for doing so , hence the first factor was on the favourite side.
• The material copied on napster's website were songs that is close to the core of creative works type which meant to be protected by copyright and the entire songs were downloaded which makes the factor 2 and 3 in against Napster.
• The music download activities produce harms to album sales, which surely in favourite of the plaintiff's position. and nailed the defeat of Napster in this case.

As result , Napster was ordered an injunction and commanded Napster to keep track and control of future infringing activities which Napster failed to comply and thus had to close down its service in July 2001.

Personal Opinion

The A&M Vs Napster Case had defined a rules of online, peer to peer file sharing networks which witness few other famous cases involving companies that conduct same nature of business as Napster such as Grokster, LimeWire, Morpheus, and KaZaA. However there are still some flaw in the intellectual property law as we can see there are still many more online p2p Sharing surviving legal suit battle. Among all , Pirate Bay is one of the famous company that are continuing battle for the future of internet file sharing.

Much more improvement on the IP laws have to be done to further improve the enforcement of Copyright Laws and uphold the future of music industry.