One of Felten's students has written an analysis of the charges the RIAA brought against a Princeton student for operating a campus-wide search-engine. It's very good, addressing the baselessness of the contributory infringement claim.
The Wake case shares some elements with the Napster case, if only because both services enable users to search for shared music. But they diverge in several legally significant respects:
* Napster supplied file-serving as well as file-searching-and-indexing capability to its users via its software and servers. Wake-like systems possesses only the searching-and-indexing capability. The file-serving was provided by third-party SMB client software, which is part of the Windows operating system used by many of Wake's alleged users.
* Napster permitted users to share only MP3-encoded sound files. Wake-like systems index all files, regardless of format. This gives those systems systems a substantially larger set of non-infringing uses.
* Napster's clientele could share files only in the context of the Napster network. Wake's alleged clientele could share files over the Princeton network without even knowing that Wake existed. In fact, file-sharing on the Princeton network was widespread well before Wake's alleged author arrived on the Princeton campus as a freshman. Even the name "wake.princeton.edu" speaks to this: it is an allusion to the better-known "sleep.princeton.edu", an indexing service described in the Daily Princetonian that began operating before the defendant even came to Princeton.
(via /.)
