Originally Posted by gideongallery

In this case the supreme court ruled (majority opp)

""...in the absence of other evidence of intent, a court would be unable to find contributory infringement liability merely based on a failure to take affirmative steps to prevent infringement, if the device otherwise was capable of substantial noninfringing uses. Such a holding would tread too close to the Sony safe harbor."

however they ruled that it should be sent back because

"[t]his case differs markedly from Sony" based on insufficient evidence of noninfringing uses"

that was why it was sent back.

now getting back to your arguement that the be all and end all of fair use is what is defined in the act

YOU KNOW THIS IS NOT TRUE, all you have to do is look at the act and see that there is no fair use "time shifting" defined in the act, nor is there any "format shifting" (your referenced case)

Court case like ones i have quoted have ADDED THESE FAIR USE RIGHTS, and just like the ones specified in the all the cases i have referenced

when the technology can be used for a noninfinging use then technology as a whole is non-infringing.

and you must go after the people who are actually using the technology to infringe on the copyright (infringing seeders)

So far the court have not ruled on weather the copyright holder had a choice to artifically inflate the number of infringements (non time shifting, non backup using acts) of the technology by CHOOSING not to take the infringing seeders out of the swarm by targeting the infringing seeders isp. AND THEN USING this artificially inflated percentage of infringing uses to destroy the technology as a whole.

As a person who understands technology who realizes that torrent technology could be used to significantly reduce the cost of backing up files by eliminating redundancies in the backup (instead of backing up windows 100 times you can reconstruct a corrupt dll in the os from the other copies in the network). I would hate to see the technology killed.

I also don't believe the court would rule that copyright holders have a right to create the situation of a majority infringement and then profit from this action to kill what could be a legitimate technology.