The government’s copyright conspiracy theory for similar reasons fails as a matter of law. The Criminal statute at issue namely Section 506 only imposes liability for direct, willful infringement that causes specific damages.
The Copyright Act does not criminalize secondary copyright infringement. Defendants cannot be held criminally responsible for what users do after they leave the KAT search engine behind. The indictment does not even come close to alleging direct "willful" copyright infringement as KAT contains and transmits no content files. By the time any possible primary infringement by a former KAT visitor could ever occur the visit to the site is long over.
#JUDICIAL CONSENT MOVIE TORRENT DOWNLOAD SOFTWARE#
After leaving the defendants' alleged websites, the visitor may stop and do nothing or use the data in such torrent files in conjunction with third party "client" software and that pursuit may, according to the desires of the user and the uncertain nature of the availability of third party files on the internet, lead to both infringing and non-infringing files being constructed that are located elsewhere on the Internet. Such files contain textual information assembled by automated processes and do NOT contain copyrighted content. Distilled down, in terms of technology, nothing more is alleged in the CC than that a visitor to defendants' alleged "KickAssTorrents" ("KAT") site can take advantage of automated search processes embodied there to search for and locate "dot torrent" files. Vaulin’s involvement in KAT shall await another day. This alleged criminal copyright case arises out of an erroneous theory of criminal copyright law advanced by the United States that attempts to hold Artem Vaulin ("Defendant") criminally liable for the alleged infringing acts of KAT's search engine users. The key issue - as we pointed out in our post - and which is also true of the Dotcom/Megaupload case - is that the DOJ appears to be making up a secondary liability for criminal infringement claim, which does not exist in the law. While I would imagine that the request resulted in some hearty laughter among DOJ lawyers, it does lay out some of the key arguments that Vaulin will likely make as the case moves forward. His first move, last week, was to send the DOJ a letter, asking it to drop the case. Thus, it was little surprise that Ira Rothken, who has managed the legal efforts for Kim Dotcom/Megaupload, has now signed on to represent Vaulin as well. We noted that it appeared that the alleged operator, Arten Vaulin, was getting the "Megaupload treatment," as there were a number of similarities between the two cases and the legal leaps of logic employed by the Justice Department in making their case. Last month, we looked at the criminal complaint against the alleged operator of the torrent search engine Kickass Torrents (KAT) and raised a number of questions about the complaint.