The Risks of Indirect Infringement

摘要

When is an intellectual property infringer not an infringer? When it is a dance hall, a VCR manufacturer, a peer-to-peer software developer, a web-hosting service, or a major research university. Or, if Congress gets its way, it is Google. In each of these situations, the parties involved were not actually engaged in copyright or trademark infringement, but they were found to have committed-or at least were sued for-copyright infringement under a legal principle known as indirect infringement. Indirect in-