A Canadian federal court ruled against a motion that would have let the music industry begin suing individuals who share copyright music on the Internet.
Justice Konrad von Finckenstein ruled that the Canadian Recording Industry Association did not prove copyright infringement by 29 music uploaders.
He said downloading a song or making files available in shared directories, as facilitated by the popular peer-to-peer Kazaa service, does not constitute copyright infringement under Canadian law.
“No evidence was presented that the alleged infringers either distributed or authorized the reproduction of sound recordings,” von Finckenstein wrote. “They merely placed personal copies into their shared directories which were accessible by other computer users via a P2P service.”
