Legal Overview

There are obviously many areas of law that could come into play here. So far, I’ve been searching for a few recent court cases in each area that may help me dive into deeper issues, many of which are very recent and some of which are still undecided. Since so many areas are sort of…wishy-washy, I am guessing that much of the legal brief will be in the form of safety recommendations/advisory warnings against stepping around possible pitfalls.

Areas of Concern:

1) Having a more centralized server:

A lot of lawsuits that have developed against BitTorrent have been against people who host the tracker servers. If iTunes implements a centralized server and tracker, will it be held more responsible for its clients’ actions? One of the major precedents here would be in the lawsuits against Napster. The recording industry argued that the “indexing server” Napster maintained made the company responsible for acts of infringement committed by users. In the past P2P networks have been saved from this due to their decentralized nature.

A centralized server that stores information could also lead groups like the RIAA and MPAA to demand that iTunes share the information with them about customers who are potentially infringing copyright use. In RIAA vs. Verizon, the court held that the DMCA did not authorize the issuance of a subpoena to an ISP acting only as a conduit…but iTunes is not an ISP, and has less of a claim to neutrality with a centralized server. Could iTunes be forced to share valuable client information?

2) The DMCA

From class we’ve seen how poorly this act has been used. I think the main issue here would be whether or not iTunes would be held responsible for any possible “circumventing” that their clients might do, since the use of BitTorrent itself by Apple would obviously be through legal/contracted/purchased terms. I have not found any cases that would indicate that iTunes would have any responsibility, especially since there are things like QTFairUse that strip the DRM from iTunes songs for Linux. QTFairUse has survived and is available for download today, and I could not find any legal actions taken by either Apple or the music industry for rights violations.

3) Others: DRM lawsuits, Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, BitTorrent’s New Release

There are numerous other issues that I am still looking in to, especially since a lot of the legal issues have so far been against music sharing, not video sharing. For example, Window’s Vista is apparently crippled by the DRM restrictions it must follow. Would iTunes videos be subject to any similar media restrictions? Also in a recent case, Sony was sued and found liable for not telling consumers CDs sold by the company contained DRM software that monitored user listening habits. With all the mods of tracking and recording information that our project proposes, iTunes may have to be very careful and clear about explaining what they are tracking and why, perhaps in the licensing agreement. The Family Entertainment and Copyright Act was just a newer law passed about video recording that I thought may be useful to look at. BitTorrent has recently announced that it will be selling movies similar to this project, so it will be interesting to watch that develop over the next few days.