Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Wed, 6 Jul 2011 22:09:26 PDT Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110706/13114714988/silly-promotional-stunt-lawsuit-against-cbs-profiting-piracy-dropped.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110706/13114714988/silly-promotional-stunt-lawsuit-against-cbs-profiting-piracy-dropped.shtml publicity stunt lawsuit. David's startup was being sued by broadcasters, such as CBS, for trying to retransmit TV channels online. So, David first put together a silly and ridiculous video insisting that the reason CBS was suing him was because it was profiting from piracy and wanted to keep that racket going or something. The crux of the claim was that CBS owns CNET. CNET runs download.com. Limewire was distributed via download.com. Limewire was found guilty of copyright infringement. Thus, CBS profits from piracy. That's a stretch by any imagination, but David took it even further and sued CBS. We noted at the time that the lawsuit seemed unlikely to get very far, and that's definitely the case.

The lawsuit has been dropped entirely. Of course, most of the hot air deflated from the suit when David and his co-plaintiffs had trouble listing out any actual copyrights that were infringed. They finally dug up one movie and five songs, but the original strong claims were severely weakened. David's lawyer insists that they'll refile the lawsuit with more people and more infringement claims, but I still can't see the lawsuit getting anywhere at all.

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]]> there-goes-that-plan http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20110706/13114714988 Wed, 4 May 2011 16:06:00 PDT Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110504/12543914144/silly-lawsuit-filed-against-cbs-because-subsidiary-cnet-offered-limewire-download.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110504/12543914144/silly-lawsuit-filed-against-cbs-because-subsidiary-cnet-offered-limewire-download.shtml CBS profits from piracy and doesn't want others getting into the game and competing. No, really. You can see the video here: The logical trainwreck comes from the fact that CBS bought CNET a few years ago, and among CNET's properties is Download.com, which is probably the single most popular place for companies to offer up their software products for download. It's been that way for years. One of the many, many, many software products available to download from Download.com was Limewire, which (as you know) was recently found guilty of facilitating copyright infringement. David's argument is that CBS makes a ton of money from this setup. It doesn't. CBS may make a little bit of money from this, but it's not even a rounding error on CBS's bottom line. This is so far removed from CBS's business it's hard to do more than laugh at the accusations.

However, David has now taken it to another level, and together with some hip hop and R&B artists, is suing CBS for copyright infringement over this same issue. It seems pretty clear that this is a nuisance suit from David, who is upset about the lawsuits against his company -- which seem to have a lot stronger basis in law. I can't see how CBS has liability here. We're not even talking about standard third party liability here. CBS is a fourth or fifth party here, at best. The actual infringement comes from end users. Limewire is the tool they use. CBS's CNET's Download.com is the tool that Limewire uses. To blame CBS for that is a huge stretch. Also, unless I'm missing it, nowhere in the lawsuit filing embedded below do I see what specific copyrights of the plaintiffs CBS is accused of infringing upon...

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]]> fourth-party-liability? http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20110504/12543914144