Advanced Copyright Law on the Internet

(a) The Diamond Multimedia Case

The Ninth Circuit’s rulings with respect to the AHRA in Recording Indus. Ass’n of Am.
v. Diamond Multimedia Sys.^342 are discussed in Section III.C.2(c)(1) below in conjunction with
the analysis of the Napster cases.

(b) The Napster Cases

For a discussion of the rulings with respect to the AHRA in the Napster cases, see
Section III.C.2(c)(1) below.

(c) The Aimster Case

In In re Aimster Copyright Litigation,^343 the plaintiffs brought copyright infringement
claims against the Aimster peer-to-peer file sharing site and its operators for secondary liability
for the infringing distribution of the plaintiffs’ copyrighted sound recordings. On a motion for a
preliminary injunction, the defendants asserted that the plaintiffs had failed to establish that
Aimster’s users were engaged in direct copyright infringement because the AHRA provided an
affirmative defense. The defendants argued that the AHRA shielded them from liability because
it was intended to immunize from liability personal use of copyrighted material by protecting all
noncommercial copying by consumers of digital and analog musical recordings, relying on the
Ninth Circuit’s Diamond Multimedia case, discussed in Section III.C.2(c)(1) below.^344

The court rejected the defendants’ reliance on the AHRA, distinguishing the Diamond
Multimedia case as follows:

The facts of the instant case and Diamond Multimedia are markedly different.

The activity at issue in the present case is the copying of MP3 files from one

user’s hard drive onto the hard drive of another user. The Rio in Diamond

Multimedia, by contrast, “merely [made] copies in order to render portable, or

‘space shift,’ those files that already reside on a user’s hard drive.” 180 F.3d at

1079. The difference is akin to a[n] owner of a compact disc making a copy of
      the music onto a tape for that owner’s sole use while away from home versus the
      owner making thousands of copies of the compact disk onto a tape for distribution
      to all of his friends. Furthermore, Diamond Multimedia had nothing whatsoever
      to do with whether the MP3 files on the owner’s computers themselves infringed
      copyrights. Rather, the decision was limited solely to the infringement issue
      regarding the act of shifting files from a computer to a personal device and

(^342) 180 F.3d 1072 (9th Cir. 1999).
(^343) 252 F. Supp. 2d 634 (N.D. Ill. 2002), aff’d on other grounds, 334 F.3d 643 (7th Cir. 2003), cert. denied, 124 S.
Ct. 1069 (2004).
(^344) Id. at 648-49.