{"id":184000,"date":"2012-09-12T18:31:00","date_gmt":"2012-09-12T23:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2012\/09\/12\/sanity-breaks-out-in-ip\/"},"modified":"2012-09-12T18:31:00","modified_gmt":"2012-09-12T23:31:00","slug":"sanity-breaks-out-in-ip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2012\/09\/12\/sanity-breaks-out-in-ip\/","title":{"rendered":"Sanity Breaks Out In IP"},"content":{"rendered":"

A federal judge just ruled that there is no legal obligation to secure your WiFi signal in order to prevent file sharing<\/a>:<\/p>\n

It looks like it might be hard for rights holders in various entertainment industries to sue individuals who have open Wi-Fi networks for copyright infringement done by guests, if the following court case is any indication. A California man whose open network was allegedly used to download a copyrighted video cannot be sued, according to a ruling by a federal judge.<\/p>\n

The complaint filed in April of this year alleged that Hatfield was negligent because he didn’t secure his network, and therefore liable.<\/p>\n

AF Holdings, who admitted in its case that it does not know the identity of the user who downloaded its video using BitTorrent, targeted Josh Hatfield with a lawsuit in federal court because it was downloaded via his unsecured home Internet connection. Hatfield moved for a dismissal on the grounds that the plaintiff failed “to state a claim” and that the claim “is barred by Section 301 of the Copyright Act and by immunity under the Communications Decency Act.”<\/p>\n

U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton dismissed the claim last week. The Electronic Frontier Foundation planned on submitting an amicus brief on behalf of Hatfield if the case had gone forward.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m not surprised by the ruling, but I am surprised that it happened this early in the process.<\/p>\n

I think that people are beginning to recognize just how f%$#ed up the current IP regime is, and they are no longer willing to treat potential offenders like they’ve robbed a gas station.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A federal judge just ruled that there is no legal obligation to secure your WiFi signal in order to prevent file sharing: It looks like it might be hard for rights holders in various entertainment industries to sue individuals who have open Wi-Fi networks for copyright infringement done by guests, if the following court case …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1134,997,1109,972,1025],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-184000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-copyright","category-internet","category-ip","category-justice","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184000"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184000"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184000\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}