Aimster Appeal Decision

Aimster Appeal Decision

June 30, 2003

The Aimster Appeal Decision is in! Download it from here... UPDATED with my comments so far.

Here's the link to the Appeals Court decision.

I'm trying to understand it now... but I thought I'd post it right away.

Update from Mike's comment: Yes, it makes my brain hurt, too. On the one hand the Court says that we didn't present any evidence of non-infringing use - and that if we had, there might have been a different result.

But then the Court says that there was no need for an evidentiary hearing or even for any discovery, because there were no disputed facts that might have changed the result!

I'm thinking I might go out to ILAW 2003 (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/) at Stanford Law School just to see if anyone out there understands what this means.

One thing for sure, I can't wait to get to trial. The facts that the Court says we need to prove will certainly be proved at trial.

We've also put up a press release on the Aimster Appeal decision.

Update: Professor Felten analyzes the Appeals Court decision, and wonders why we didn't present more evidence in the District Court. (http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000414.html)

But as I say above, the District Court just didn't allow us to put any more evidence in - although we asked to.

And yet, as Professor Felten points out, the entire Appeals Court decision hangs on the lack of evidence being presented.

Seems like an error in the Appeals Court opinion, right?

- by Aimee Deep at 03:28 PM with 45 comments

Comments

Initial thoughs after the first read: I have serious questions as to the use of encryption (crypto) in making user data anonymous, as Aimster/Madster did. Per the DMCA, attempts (including 'educational/research' reasons) to crack/break crypto is against the law. So the people that run the P2P (or any network) where crypto is deployed is expceted to guess/assume what their users are doing, but they are prohibited by federal law from actually finding out because that would involve breaking the encryption? Ummm, OK. This makes my brain hurt... I'll have to re-read the Court's opinion tomorrow to try and make sense of it. The Betamax/timeshifting parts are encouraging though. Posted by: MW, http://blog.mikewren.com on July 1, 2003 01:41 AM

When will it go to full trial? Will anything happen before the trial? The decision does seem a bit of a contradiction. Posted by: ciaran tannam, http://www.slyck.com on July 2, 2003 01:06 PM

Thanks for posting the decision. I didn't find the holding contradictory; the district Court's failure to hold an evidentiary hearing did not preclude Aimster from putting evidence in the record through affidavits. If you had, there may have been some controverted facts which would have required an evidentiary hearing to work out. Nor was discovery necessary; the facts in your favor should have been within Aimster's knowledge. Trial looks like a slam-dunk for the recording industry, I hate to say. Posted by: dave, on July 21, 2003 03:27 PM