Internet Life

Pirated Websites Closed, Users Heading To Court

Copyright infringement case against a Kazaa user

By Bogdan Popa, Security and Search Engines Editor

1st of October 2007, 10:20 GMT

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The battle against the users and websites that infringe copyrights continues with a new case in Minnesota after several companies, all of them members of the Recording Industry Association of America, filed a lawsuit against a Kazaa user. As Wired reports, the companies, including Virgin Records,

Warner Bros. Records, Sony BMG and others, demanded $3.9 million in damages because Jannie Thomas distributed no less than 1,702 files on Kazaa in 2005. Kazaa is a file sharing application which was often criticized because it gives users the chance to distribute pirated content on the Internet. According to the same source, the lawsuit was filed in the US District Court in Duluth, Minnesota.

"Plaintiffs will prove that the defendant is liable for the direct infringement of plaintiffs' copyrights because she downloaded and distributed them over the internet without plaintiffs' authorization," RIAA wrote in the complaints according to Wired. As a reply, Jannie Thomas sustained she's innocent as she never published the files mentioned in the lawsuit on the Internet. "My client is adamant that she just didn't do it. She hired me to defend her and said she's not going to settle under any circumstances," Brian Toder, the defendant's lawyer replied for Wired.

Today's Internet technologies can easily discover a user who shares pirated content on the Internet but this case started from ISP's information which discovered Jannie Thomas as the consumer connected through the reported IP.

Earlier this month, several websites which were rumored to distribute pirated content on the web were shut down after the copyright holders sent them to court. In addition, some of the plaintiffs demanded private information about the users but most of the defendants refused to offer it because this action would infringe their internal privacy policy. IsoHunt, one of the websites involved into this matter, preferred to block the US users from the page in order to protect them from such demands.

TAGS:

music | pirate | kazaa | riaa

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