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Music file sharing sites6/24/2023 So another software firm might reduce the risk of a lawsuit by declaring at every possible opportunity that its product shouldn't be used illegally, and by actively encouraging legal uses. What seems crucial is proving that the company intended to profit from lawbreaking. "There was no evidence that Sony had expressed an object of bringing about taping in violation of copyright or had taken active steps to increase its profits from unlawful taping," the judges wrote. Those arguments don't apply here, the court said. "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone," Jack Valenti, then head of the Motion Picture Association of America, said in 1982. Recent history is littered with examples of the entertainment industry panicking about technologies that ended up proving harmless - and which might not exist today had they been subject to a ruling like this one. The court has "unleashed a new era of legal uncertainty on America's innovators," says Fred von Lohmann, senior intellectual property attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which lobbies in defence of "digital freedoms". For software developers and the web at large, activists fear that the ruling will stifle progress, making entrepreneurs wary of releasing any technology that could be used illegally.
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