Russian Software Company Found Not Guilty in Landmark DMCA Case
CNET News.com reported that a jury in San Jose has found Elcomsoft not guilty of four counts of violating the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The company was charged with "desiging and marketing software that could be used to crack {Adobe} eBook copyright protections, plus an additional charge {of conspiracy}...." According to the article:
ElcomSoft attorney Joseph Burton said Tuesday's win is important as one of the first setbacks for publishers seeking to assert the law against programmers. But he cautioned that the acquittal did not mean software developers should consider themselves immune from future criminal prosecutions under the law.
The "not guilty" verdict in the case may have been inevitable in light of the jury instructions. Reportedly, "the judge told jurors that in order to find the company guilty, they must agree that company representatives knew their actions were illegal and intended to violate the law. Merely offering a product that could violate copyrights was not enough to warrant a conviction...."
On the basis of these instructions to the jury, we wonder if the legal actions taken by the RIAA and the MPAA against casual users of p2p file sharing depend for possible legal success on an overly-expansive view of their the trade groups' rights as publishers' representatives.