Unlike patents, copyrights protect expression, not products or devices. Inducement liability is not limited, either logically or as articulated in Grokster III, to those who distribute a “device.” As a result, one can infringe a copyright through culpable actions resulting in the impermissible reproduction of copyrighted expression, whether those actions involve making available a device or product or providing some service used in accomplishing the infringement. For example, a retail copying service that accepts and copies copyrighted material for customers after broadly promoting its willingness to do so may be liable for the resulting infringement although it does not produce any copying machines or sell them; all it provides is the “service” of copying. Whether the service makes copies using machines of its own manufacture, machines it owns, or machines in someone else’s shop would not matter, as copyright liability depends on one’s purposeful involvement in the process of reproducing copyrighted material, not the precise nature of that involvement.

For a time, for example, isoHunt prominently featured a list of “Box Office Movies,” containing the 20 highest-grossing movies then playing in U.S. theaters. When a user clicked on a listed title, she would be invited to “upload [a] torrent” file for that movie. In other words, she would be asked to upload a file that, once downloaded by other users, would lead directly to their obtaining infringing content. Fung also posted numerous messages to the isoHunt forum requesting that users upload torrents for specific copyrighted films; in other posts, he provided links to torrent files for copyrighted movies, urging users to download them

Fung and amicus curiae Google argue that the acts of infringement must be caused by the manifestations of the distributor’s improper object—that is, by the inducing messages themselves. Columbia, on the other hand, maintains that it need only prove that the “acts of infringement by third parties” were caused by the product distributed or services provided.

We are mindful, however, of the potential severity of a loose causation theory for inducement liability. Under this theory of liability, the only causation requirement is that the product or service at issue was used to infringe the plaintiff’s copyrights. The possible reach of liability is enormous, particularly in the digital age.

Fung argues, on this basis, that some of the acts of infringement by third parties relied upon by the district court may not have involved his websites at all. He points out, for example, that by far the largest number of torrents tracked by the Torrentbox tracker are obtained from somewhere other than Torrentbox.com. If a user obtained a torrent from a source other than his websites, Fung maintains, he cannot be held liable for the infringement that resulted.

We do not decide the degree to which Fung can be held liable for having caused infringements by users of his sites or trackers. The only issue presently before us is the permanent injunction, which, as in Grokster III, does not in this case depend on the “exact calculation of infringing use[] as a basis for a claim of damages.” 545 U.S. at 941. We therefore need not further entertain Fung’s causation arguments at this time, but leave it to the district court to consider them, in light of the observations we have made, when it calculates damages.

The district court should not have rejected this safe harbor on the ground it did. Perfect 10, Inc. v. CCBill LLC, 488 F.3d 1102 (9th Cir. 2007), held that the § 512(a) safe harbor does not require that the service provider transmit or route infringing material, explaining that “[t]here is no requirement in the statute that the communications must themselves be infringing, and we see no reason to import such a requirement.” Id. at 1116; see also id. (“Service providers are immune for transmitting all digital online communications, not just those that directly infringe.”).

Under these circumstances, we hold the connection between the infringing activity and Fung’s income stream derived from advertising is sufficiently direct to meet the direct “financial benefit” prong of § 512(c)(1)(B). Fung promoted advertising by pointing to infringing activity; obtained advertising revenue that depended on the number of visitors to his sites; attracted primarily visitors who were seeking to engage in infringing activity, as that is mostly what occurred on his sites; and encouraged that infringing activity. Given this confluence of circumstances, Fung’s revenue stream was tied directly to the infringing activity involving his websites, both as to his ability to attract advertisers and as to the amount of revenue he received.

Beyond the specifically-named examples, no one reading this injunction can tell what it means for a term to be “widely known to be associated with copyright infringement.” We understand the desire to build flexibility into the injunction. But Rule 65(d), overall, prefers certainty to flexibility. Subsection (ii) of the injunction’s definition of “Infringement-Related Terms” therefore must be modified to state simply that the phrase includes specifically named terms.

Fung maintains, and we agree, that certain provisions of the injunction could be interpreted to prevent Fung from ever working for any technology company whose services others might use to infringe copyright, even if those other companies are not themselves liable for primary or secondary copyright infringement.... We agree that insofar as the injunction can be interpreted to prohibit Fung from seeking legitimate employment, it is more burdensome than necessary to provide Plaintiffs relief.

I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.

The lawyers for the plaintiff class threatened Moughni with both a defamation suit and disciplinary charges (Moughni is a lawyer, although not by any means a specialist in class actions). Moughni would not back down, so the plaintiff’s lawyers asked the judge to shut down the page — or, more precisely, they asked that Moughni be required to take everything he had said about the case down, and to post on his Facebook page instead what they said (and what the Court had said) (That is why I am not linking to my client’s Facebook page – it isn’t really HIS page any more. Let the parties do their own publicity.) And, they asked that Moughni be forbidden to make any statements that class members might see or hear, such as by talking about the litigation to the press which, in turn, might print stories from which class members might learn Moughni’s views.

The lawyers continued their claim that they had been defamed, but really, they said, this isn’t about us, this is about protecting the poor class members against having their confidence in the lawyers undermined, protecting public confidence in the court system, and preventing class members from being confused about whether they should object to having their claims for damages extinguished so that settlement funds could go to the charities (and the lawyers). The judge held a hearing a few days later; plaintiff’s counsel spoke his piece, McDonald’s lawyers chimed in with their agreement, but Moughni’s attempt to speak was rebuffed with a peremptory “Don’t you even” from the judge. And the judge ruled, granting the injunction almost exactly as requested.

Giving Moughni only a few days’ notice, the Court convened an emergency hearing; then, without hearing from Moughni, issued a prior restraint of unparallelled breadth, barring Moughni from making any public statements about an entire subject matter, even statements that were entirely truthful and not at all misleading. It further compelled him to place speech with which he fervently disagreed on his own web page; and it forbade him from dissemination, circulation or publication of any opt-out form or objection during the crucial ten-day period before the deadline for members of the class to decide whether to opt out or object. On a literal reading of the injunction, Moughni was barred even from speaking to his own wife and children about the settlement, and even from submitting an objection to the settlement on his own behalf.

While he was pro se, Moughni acknowledged that he is not an expert in class action procedure; as his counsel, we readily concede that some of his statements could have been worded more felicitously. But Moughni was not counsel for a named party; he spoke only as a member of the affected community, and the Court’s order holding him to standards that would have been inappropriate even for a lawyer in the case violated black-letter law against prior restraints of speech. The injunction should, therefore, be vacated immediately. In addition, during the crucial ten-day period before the opt-out or objection deadline, the order deprived the class of the opportunity to hear dissenting views about whether to go along with a settlement that potentially deprives them of valuable rights. The Court should, therefore, reopen the period for the class to respond to the notice, and should defer any decision about approval of the settlement until that time has expired.

Moughni has his own view, but our motion takes no position on the merits of the settlement: our only point is that Moughni ought to have the right to say what he thinks about the settlement, and that the remedy for speech claimed to be false is not less speech but more speech. In my own mind, I have come to no conclusion about the merits of the proposed settlement.

But that just leaves me wondering, if the settlement is so wonderful, why the lawyers felt they had to resort to suppressing critical speech instead of just putting their own replies into the marketplace of ideas. At the hearing for an injunction, they had reminded the Court of how attentive the national media press had been to their publicity about the settlement (115 national media outlets, and a hundred million viewers, they claimed); surely the media would continue to give them a platform.

Because CBSI distributed several torrent software programs and encouraged infringement on torrent networks, CBSI is liable for all infringement on the torrent network.

Plaintiffs have not shown any likelihood that Defendants will be found liable for their continuing activities. There is ample evidence of BitTorrent’s – and other P2P software’s – ability to infringe copyrights and that a large number of individuals use the software to infringe. Defendants are clearly aware of both of these facts. However, inducement of infringement requires more than just knowledge of actual or potential infringement. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. 545 U.S. 913, 937 (2005). While there might be some evidence of past inducement of copyright infringement, there is no evidence of any ongoing distribution of any file sharing software “with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement.”

The Court is well-aware that injunctions are often properly imposed where allegedly wrongful conduct has ceased. However, there must be at least some evidence that future infringement may occur. Here, Plaintiffs’ only solid evidence of possible inducement comes from reviews that were published a decade ago.... The other articles cited by Plaintiffs merely discuss P2P issues, including legitimate distribution through P2P, and the various technological and legal issues that have emerged with the technologies. (See id., Ex. M, O, T, U, V, X.) The Court has no reason to believe that Defendants will purposefully encourage copyright infringement now or in the foreseeable future.

The nature of some of the supposedly problematic articles also demonstrates that an injunction is not in the public interest. Most of the articles cited by Plaintiffs are straightforward, legitimate news articles that do not in any way encourage or induce copyright infringement. This suggests that Plaintiffs’ goal goes far beyond stopping actual infringement by Defendants and extends instead to silencing public discussion of P2P technologies.

On Thursday, a Florida judge found no evidence that Katz suffered defamation or damages because of Chevaldina's blog, but nevertheless banned her and her husband from stepping on any of Katz's properties, which pretty much prevents them from visiting any of the local businesses in the community of Sunny Isles, which is known as Little Moscow for its high Russian population.

Judge Ellen Leesfield said they shouldn't want to visit these premises anyway because of their hatred for the man.

But Chevaldina said many of these business owners are their Russian friends who rent from Katz and invite them into their stores and restaurants.

In Sunny Isles Beach, Raanan Katz has a street and an official day named in his honor. His company, with its omnipresent "RK" basketball logo, seems to claim every other strip mall in North Miami-Dade. He's also minority owner of the Miami Heat....

Katz cuts a singular figure in Miami. Once an Israeli basketball star, he built a real estate empire in Boston before gobbling up a block of South Beach in 1984. Two years later, he bought into the expansion Heat franchise and has been a courtside fixture since then.

True to form, Defendants have enthusiastically embraced this new engine of piracy, distributing over 65 million copies of bittorrent applications and, again, shamelessly promoting their use for purposes of infringement. Defendants' inducement has sometimes become somewhat more sophisticated and subtle, in that, for example, Defendants now include a mild, disingenuous disclaimer about piracy on some of their web-pages and evidently no longer host certain P2P applications on their servers. Defendants, however, still expressly and explicitly show users how to use bittorrent programs to find copyrighted files to download. At all times, Defendants were aware that the bittorent programs they distributed were used overwhelmingly for infringing copyrighted works – primarily music, software, movies and video games. Although some court cases have found the proprietors of torrent websites liable for secondary copyright infringement,3 no court case has yet directly involved bittorrent applications and technology itself. Like a leopard that cannot change its spots and despite this Court’s clear admonishment that Defendants cannot simultaneously distribute software applications that they have encouraged to be used for purposes of infringement,4 Defendants continue to distribute bittorrent applications under the intentionally lazy and under-reactive guise that they cannot be held liable for this activity until a court order specifically prohibits the use of bittorrent technology to infringe Plaintiffs’ works. Although Plaintiffs believe it probable that courts will soon explicitly find the popular bittorrent applications to be secondarily liable for copyright infringement just as Napster and LimeWire were, it is beyond doubt that Defendants’ distribution of these programs and concurrent intent to induce infringement subjects Defendants to inducement liability, independent of any further inquiry. Bittorrent is a clear and present danger to copyrighted works. From evidence readily available in CNET’s own “news” articles, it is clear that bittorrent applications like uTorrent are growing explosively to fill the infringement vacuum left by Gnutella applications.

Defendants also use the purported “news” arms of their websites to dress up the marketing of bittorrent applications as legitimate news reporting. For example, CNET editor Seth Rosenblatt (the same individual who authored the fivestar review of uTorrent), wrote a May 14, 2012 article published and available on Defendants website titled “Download This Mr. Jones,” ostensibly about how the recording artist the Counting Crows had partnered with the software publisher of uTorrent to release their music for free download via torrent.... In a portion of the article quoting the lead singer of the Counting Crows regarding the 150 million users of uTorrent, Rosenblatt included hyperlinks accompanied by the word “download” to the CNET download pages for uTorrent and BitTorrent.

"Apple has made a clear showing that, in the absence of a preliminary injunction, it is likely to lose substantial market share in the smartphone market and to lose substantial downstream sales of future smartphone purchases and tag-along products," Judge Koh said in Friday's ruling.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

It's also pretty rich that Microsoft should complain about the possibility of an injunction being granted against it by another jurisdiction when that is precisely what it is trying to do by filing an action against Motorola in the International Trade Commission as well as in a US District Court. If Microsoft says German courts shouldn't get involved in its dispute with Motorola, it's equally ridiculous that an international trade body should be dragged into a domestic dispute between two US companies, as Techdirt has noted before.

Basically, Microsoft is just whining because it thinks it's going to lose in Germany, and has gone running to the US judge in an attempt to subvert that country's judicial system. It's a huge pity that he acceded to this ridiculous request: it creates a terrible precedent that's likely to lead to more such interference in the legal systems of other countries -- including foreign courts ordering companies not to obey US rulings -- and a general weakening of respect for the rule of law around the world.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Microsoft's hurried decision to withdraw its entire distribution center from Germany shows a possible consequence of this double-edged sword: companies pull out so that patent-friendly courts can't be turned against them. As patent litigation balloons, and more cases head to Germany, other foreign companies may come to the same conclusion as Microsoft, and start taking the same defensive precautions. In which case, Germany will find that far from attracting foreign investors, its patent-friendly courts are actually driving them away.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Mr Justice Tugendhat :

At about 1430 this afternoon Eady refused NGN's application to remove the anonymity he had granted to the claimant on 20 April. He said at para 23 ([2011] EWHC 1326 (QB)) that "It is important always to remember that the modern law of privacy is not concerned solely with secrets: it is also concerned importantly with intrusion". Intrusion in this sense includes harassment.

Very shortly afterwards a name was mentioned by Mr Hemming MP in the House of Commons in the course of a question which was interrupted by the Speaker. On that basis NGN asked me to hear a further application shortly after 5pm for the anonymity of the claimant to be removed. As the public now know, anyone who wanted to find out the name of the claimant could have learnt it many days ago. The reason is that it is has been repeated thousands of times on the internet. NGN now want to join in.

It is obvious that if the purpose of this injunction were to preserve a secret, it would have failed in its purpose. But in so far as its purpose is to prevent intrusion or harassment, it has not failed. The fact that tens of thousands of people have named the claimant on the internet confirms that the claimant and his family need protection from intrusion into their private and family life. The fact that a question has been asked in Parliament seems to me to increase, and not to diminish the strength of his case that he and his family need that protection. The order has not protected the claimant and his family from taunting on the internet. It is still effective to protect them from taunting and other intrusion and harassment in the print media.

Mr Hislop, who has twice challenged Mr Marr's super-injunction, said: "As a leading BBC interviewer who is asking politicians about failures in judgment, failures in their private lives, inconsistencies, it was pretty rank of him to have an injunction while working as an active journalist.

with "members of Parliament, journalists and lawyers", along with the US coastguard and any ship owners, and also forbids any speculation linking chemicals in the paint with the illness of any individuals.