A Californian federal court last week ruled that AOL is not
liable for the unauthorised posting of some e-books on its servers.
The world’s largest ISP was sued by Harlan Ellison, an author who
argued that the company was infringing his copyrights by allowing
unauthorised copies of his work to remain on Usenet servers for two
weeks.
Usenet (an abbreviation of “User Network”) allows users to post
messages on various subjects that are posted to servers on a
worldwide network. Each subject collection of posted notes forms a
newsgroup - of which there are several thousand.
Stephen Robertson, a fan of Ellison, scanned his work and posted
it to the alt.binaries.e-book newsgroup. Robertson was also sued by
Ellison, but settled the case out of court.
Ellison argued that AOL’s conduct was analogous to that of
Napster. The court disagreed. In granting AOL’s motion for summary
judgment last week, Judge Florence-Marie Cooper noted that AOL’s
servers were “just one hop” on Usenet’s distributed network and
that the company was protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act which provides that, in effect, an ISP is not liable for
disputed material on its servers if it removes it when
notified.
The ruling was important for ISPs in the US. AOL has been a
Usenet peer since 1994 and the company estimates that its peer
servers receive 4.5 terabytes of data in over 24 million messages
every week from users.
