eCommerce Legal Environment 45-848
Homework 2
General homework policies are the same as those of Electronic Payment Systems, 20-763, which you may read at http://euro.ecom.cmu.edu/program/courses/tcr763/admin.shtml.
All homework must be submitted as a Microsoft Word file
with extension .doc by email to shamos@cs.cmu.edu. The filename should include your name.
Whenever a problem
seems to call for a yes or no answer, you must answer “yes” or “no AND provide
an explanation for your answer. Failure
to explain will result in a zero for the question.
This homework is worth a total of 300 points.
WinMX (see http://www.winmx.com) is a technology that, unlike Napster, maintains no indexes of available copyrighted material. It is similar to Gnutella. First you download the WinMX program to your client laptop. Then you can use it to connect to other private individuals who are willing to share files with you. Many of these files contain copyrighted material. You can do searches to find out what is available and acquire copies of valuable software and music without paying anything. Assume that none of this material other than the WinMX program itself is available from winmx.com.
a. Of course WinMX knows the purpose for which its software is being used. Is WinMX a contributory copyright infringer?
b. Is the WinMX program a “circumvention device” within the meaning of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act?
c. Suppose a major software publisher sends a letter to winmx.com stating, “We are aware that your program is being used on a large scale to make illegal copies of our copyrighted software. We demand that you modify the program so that when a user searches for one of our products, your program will fail to respond to the search. Attached is a list of 30 products we sell.” Suppose further that winmx.com refuses to comply with this demand. Does winmx.com have any liability to the software publisher?
d. The last sentence of the publisher’s letter states, “We further demand that you modify your program so that if any user requests any of our software, your program will secretly inform us over the Internet of such a request, including at least the IP address of the requestor and any other information you may have about the requestor.” If winmx.com decides to comply with this demand, can it do so without violating the privacy rights of people who are using WinMX? (To answer this question you may need to visit winmx.com. You may also need to decide whether people who are committing illegal acts are entitled to privacy concerning those acts.) If you decide that privacy rights would be violated, state what winmx.com could do to enable them to provide the information demanded without violating privacy rights.
e. Suppose CMU becomes aware that large numbers of students are using WinMX to make copies of copyrighted music and software over the CMU network. Assume that CMU takes no action to stop this activity even after being notified by software publishers that it is taking place. Is CMU a contributory copyright infringer? If so, under what theory? If not, exactly why not?
The following file used to exist on one of CMU’s servers: http://euro.ecom.cmu.edu/program/courses/tcr751/2003/Hwk4.htm. You are familiar with it. It was one of your homework assignments. I wrote it. (Assume that the page contains sufficient authorship to be copyrightable and that I am the copyright owner .) I removed it from the server because I don’t want students in future classes to see the old homeworks. However, Google has interfered with my plan.
Do a Google search for the string “developing your ProductXML”. You should get one hit, namely the above page. When you click on the link from Google, you should get “page not found.” Notice that there is another link after the Google hit labeled “Cached”. When you click this link, you will be looking at the page that I removed from the server. This must mean that Google maintains a complete copy of the page that no longer exists at CMU.
a. When Google copied the page to index it, did it infringe my copyright? Explain EXACTLY why or why not. Remember that Google is not an individual and nothing it does is for “personal use.”
b. By maintaining a complete copy of the page in its database, does Google infringe my copyright? Exactly why or why not?
c. By delivering the page to anyone who asks for it by clicking the “Cached” link, is Google infringing my copyright? If so, which of the exclusive rights of the author is it infringing?