PiracyWatch: Small Wins Compete With Larger Arguments

By Eriq Gardner

The MPAA is on a bit of a winning streak of late. The studio trade association has won small victories, getting pullmylink.com, showstash.com, cinematube.com and other BitTorrent tracking-movie-linking sites to cease operations in recent weeks. Judging by some of the buzz in tech circles, however, the entertainment industry may need another big decision on par with the Grokster or Napster cases to drive home the point that case law favors content holders against pirates trying to wiggle out of much liability.

Lawyers and legal scholars are still pushing legislative readings that would limit the scope of MPAA and RIAA battles against file-sharers.

The latest comes from a Harvard professor who claims that federal law that punishes copyright infringement is actually a criminal, rather than civil, statute. The lawsuits are brought in civil court, of course, but Professor Charles Nesson of Harvard Law School believes that minimum statutory penalties apply in criminal cases and that excessive penalties in civil cases are unconstitutional. The professor has made his arguments in a case against a teenager, Joel Tenenbaum, accused of downloading seven songs over a P2P network.