Comfortable Disappearance

Sometime ago, I stumbled across this interest article over at WebTVWire, which lays out an interesting case showing a high probability that linking to illegal content is illegal in the US. The author points to three cases which show the precedents courts may use to charge those whom have linked to illegal content with “contributory infringement.” This means that you have contributed to the infringement of some form of intellectual property infringement and are guilty with violating intellectual property protections afforded to individual’s intellectual property (IP).

The three cases are:

1. Plaintiff Intellectual Reserve (IR) vs Utah Lighthouse Ministry (ULM)
2. Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Reimerdes
3. Comcast vs. Hightech Electronics Inc

Each of these cases have one common thread in that they decided that the sites in questions had committed contributory infringement due to links they had posted on their site.

The Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Reimerdes case in particular strikes a very sour note with me. This case involved the program DeCSS, which broke CSS encryption found on many DVDs. However, DeCSS’ goal was not intended for pirating DVDs, although, it could be used for that. It was intended to allow individuals running the Linux Operating System the ability to play DVDs encrypted with CSS.

I wonder how a savvy lawyer could connect these decisions on contributory infringement with the arguments presented in MGM v. Grokster. The Grokster case said that a company could be held liable for infringement committed with its application only if that company marketed their product in such a way as to promote its use as an infringing tool.

It seems to me that one could defend oneself against being charged with contributory infringement if they used the arguments presented in Grokster, but altered them for infringement. Something like this: If I link to an illegal website for references purposes, say a discussion of the legality of linking, I could not be charged with contributory infringement, because I am not “marketing” that link so as to promote the infringement committed by the destination site, I am merely using it as a reference for discussion.

Just a thought…