A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., 239 F.3d 1004 (9th. Cir., 2001) was a landmark intellectual property case in which the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed a district court ruling that the defendant, peer-to-peer file sharing service Napster, could be held liable for contributory infringement and vicarious infringement of copyright.
While A&M Records served as the lead plaintiff, Napster was sued by 18 different record companies, all of which were members of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Additionally, songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were included on the Circuit Court appeal, representing the interests of "all others similarly situated."
District Court opinion
The record companies alleged both contributory and vicarious copyright infringement by Napster, and filed a motion for a preliminary injunction in order to stop the exchange of the plaintiffs' songs on the service immediately.
Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California granted the preliminary injunction, on the grounds that the plaintiffs demonstrated a reasonable likelihood of success. She issued an injunction which immediately prohibited Napster: "from engaging in, or facilitating others in copying, downloading, uploading, transmitting, or distributing plaintiffs' copyrighted musical compositions and sound recordings, protected by either federal or state law, without express permission of the rights owner." On the matter of direct copyright infringement, the Circuit Court agreed with the District Court's determination that Napster users were likely engaging in direct infringement of the plaintiffs' copyrights. in which the Supreme Court ruled that media copying technologies were acceptable if they were unlikely to cause widespread copyright infringement beyond the original user. Because of Napster's "actual, specific knowledge of direct infringement," and the unlikelihood of non-infringing uses of Napster, "[W]e are compelled to make a clear distinction between the architecture of the Napster system and Napster's conduct in relation to the operational capacity of the system." Thus, the Circuit Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs' contributory infringement claim against Napster. and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's safe harbor clause (17 U.S.C. § 512), claiming that Napster users only made allowable copies of files for their personal use, with no interest in wider distribution of unauthorized copies. The Ninth Circuit agreed with the District Court's finding that downloading MP3 files is not covered by the Audio Home Recording Act because online file sharing could spread unauthorized copies much more quickly than older forms of analog tape trading. The owners of the service settled with songwriters and music publishers, agreeing to pay $26 million.
Criticism and impact
Among a number of amicus briefs filed on behalf of both sides of the dispute, one particularly critical brief filed by a consortium of eighteen American copyright law professors argued that the district court misread the Sony precedent and took too narrow a view of fair use.
A number of file-sharing networks surfaced in Napster's wake, including Morpheus, Grokster, and KaZaA, many of which faced their own legal challenges over infringing behavior by their users. In 2005, MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. was heard by the Supreme Court and is considered by many to be the sequel to the Napster case, addressing another technology that "outpaced the law." In the following years, BitTorrent, another P2P technology, became the target of copyright scrutiny. Popular torrent trackers like the Pirate Bay faced long legal battles, but their opponents have had little success in shutting down these services permanently.
See also
- MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. (2005).