Denise Barker, a defendant in a case filed by a group of record labels, headlined by the Elektra imprint of Warner Music, and first brought to a judge a number of years ago, got some grim news this week. Barker, aided with representation from the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), heard Judge Kenneth Karas of the Southern District Court of New York offer a decision upholding the view that “sharing copyrighted music is infringement,” reported Andrew Orlowski of The Register today.
The point of contention in the case was the legalese stipulated in US Copyright Act. The EFF focused on the definition of “publication,” which is presented as “offering to distribute copies or phonorecords to a group of persons for purposes of further distribution, public performance, or public display.” Barker’s defense essentially amounted to a distinction between publication and distribution. Her purported infractions were the sharing of songs on the now-mostly-abandoned peer-to-peer network Kazaa.
Judge Karas concluded that though there was a lack of technical proof provided by the plaintiffs in the form of file transfer dates and times, such information was “irrelevant.” Instead, it is the fact that Barker was found to have granted access to such files to any interested downloaders that drove the decision to fall in favor of the record labels.