Sensible decisions
Note: the following contains opinions only; I don't know enough about the facts of the case to make statements of fact.
According to David Langford's Runcible Ansible, Ellison et al say that the lawsuit against AOL will continue. Langford provides a link to the court decision regarding Ellison's claims of copyright infringement, a 40-page PDF file; if you're interested, go to the US District Court site and follow the links to recent opinions, looking for CV 00-04321 FMC. (I'm not sure whether there are other claims against AOL that are still ongoing.)
I skimmed through the opinion, and was pleasantly surprised (as I've been several times in recent years on reading court opinions of various sorts) to see how readable and sensible it is. AOL had asked for summary judgment in the case; this opinion grants them that judgment. (It's not entirely clear to me whether that means that the court finds in favor of AOL or not, but the entire opinion is devoted to agreeing with almost everything AOL claims, so I'm guessing the net effect is that AOL wins this round.)
I'm certainly much more in favor of Ellison in general than of AOL in general. But in this particular case, I can't see any sense to Ellison's claims. He was suing AOL for both direct and contributory copyright infringement, on the grounds that they provided their users with access to the alt.binaries.e-books newsgroup, which for 14 days in the year 2000 contained some pirated Ellison texts. (Which were posted by someone who wasn't an AOL member.) I'm a longtime reader of Usenet, and all of the answers that the court's opinion elaborately arrives at seem self-evident to me: AOL did not directly infringe copyright; AOL's providing these copyrighted materials did not result in significant financial gain for AOL; AOL is an ISP and shouldn't be held liable for the content of individual Usenet postings; AOL had no way to prevent the original poster from posting these things. And so on. I'm baffled as to why only three companies were named in Ellison's suit; it seems to me that by his reasoning, every company that carries the alt.binaries.e-books newsgroup is just as liable as AOL.
The one big point on which the opinion was critical of AOL was that AOL had left an outdated email address on file with the Copyright office, and didn't forward mail from that outdated address to their new one, so they never received Ellison's lawyers' email notifying them of the problem. I agree that that's pretty egregious; and as the opinion notes, saying "we didn't know about this because we changed our address without telling anyone" is not a good defense, because it would open the door to other companies providing bad contact info or otherwise simply not reading mail that notifies them of infringements. (I think what impresses me most about this opinion is the degree to which the judge has thought through the potential consequences of deciding in various ways, and avoided decisions that would have bad side effects.) There were a couple of other points where AOL's conduct was less than sterling, too, but those were pretty minor, and not really directly relevant to the key issues.
Basically, Ellison's arguments as described in the opinion sound pretty bogus to me. But I suppose it's probably standard practice for lawyers to make a whole bunch of claims, from reasonable to ridiculous, figuring that at least some of them will get through.
Another interesting thing here: the safe-harbor-for-ISPs part of the DMCA seems to be actually working. I still think the DMCA is largely stupid, but the part about exempting ISPs seems to be having the effect one would hope for; much of this court opinion is devoted to detailed analysis of whether AOL qualifies for the safe-harbor provisions, and finding that it does.
Best line in the opinion (in response to Ellison's claim that AOL's not carrying all possible newsgroups means they're picking and choosing content, thus disqualifying their claims to be protected as an ISP):
If an ISP [would forfeit] its ability to qualify for subsection (a)'s safe harbor by deciding not to carry every USENET newsgroup or web site possible, then the DMCA would have the odd effect of punishing ISPs that choose not to carry, for example, newsgroups devoted to child pornography and prostitution, or web sites devoted to ritual torture.
Hee hee. (Um, I'm not entirely sure what the part about "carrying web sites" means; I suspect that's a mistake. But through most of this opinion, there are few such errors; the judge seems to understand the technology pretty well.) My hat's off to Judge Florence-Marie Cooper, United States District Court. Of course, I don't wear a hat, so that's not saying much, but you know what I mean.
(On the off chance that there's anyone reading this who's upset by the decision, let me note that I'm not defending pirates; I think it was quite reasonable for Ellison to sue the guy who uploaded the files in the first place, though I do think a little less aggression and a little more communication and education might've won Ellison some friends instead of making him enemies. But suing AOL for carrying a Usenet newsgroup just doesn't make any sense to me.)