The US appeals court has just handed down an interesting opinion: when determining the nature of a "repeat infringer", the court decided these could be users who download infringing content for personal use.

The case reviewed in the court is almost 10 years old and was filed by recording labels against the defunct music service MP3Tunes. The latter was originally a site selling MP3s, but later added a locker service and a service enabling users to search for MP3s online and add them to the MP3Tunes. Since many of those MP3s infringed copyright, the website and its owner Michael Robertson got sued.

The service went bankrupt 4 years ago, and the jury awarded the plaintiffs $41m in damages in 2014. After the case went to appeal, the appeals court handed down an interesting opinion of who can be called “repeat infringers”: in its opinion, all it takes to be a “repeat infringer” is to repeatedly upload or download copyrighted content for personal use without the need to know of the infringing nature of its online activities, or to upload rather than download content. Remind of someone?)

Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.