Japanese P2P Conviction: Inducing Infringement

Thursday I reported on the decision of the Japanese High Court against P2P service File Rogue. Andreas Bovens at Chosaq has a bit more and points out that the High Court's decision rests on inducement of infringement. He does a "quick 'n dirty" translation of an interesting part:

Supreme Court Judge Satō Hisao: “As tracking in detail the information shared via the Filerogue network is a technically hardly feasible task, it is not appropriate to say that MMO Japan is infringing on copyright by just providing the (Filerogue) service. However, one could expect that Filerogue would be mainly used for copyright infringing activities [1]; MMO Japan knew this and offered its service, thereby inducing infringement [2]. Furthermore, as MMO Japan can administer (the Filerogue service) and make money with it, it can be held liable as a service provider and thus can be considered as an infringer.”

(Bovens' editing)

Though the centralized File Rogue is another service than the decentralized Grokster (and, speaking for itself, this is Japanese litgation), keep this reasoning in mind if you (haven't yet) read Halderman's analysis I pointed to in the previous post.