I read an online comic called AppleGeeks (”I think I taste QuickTime.”). One of their fans recently used a site called LuLu to print a collection of their comics. This post was originally a comment I was going to leave on the guy’s site, but turned long. Here goes:

This is an interesting topic. While Chris didn’t have any real monetary gain from this, LuLu’s did, but without the knowledge of any possible copyright infringement. Does that mean that LuLu’s is to blame because they benefitted? Does that mean that Chris is to blame for (possibly) violating copyright law and LuLu’s terms of use?

I think it’s pretty clear that LuLu’s is not to blame. Their service is viable as it is intended to be used, and holds up to the test of legality (in my mind) that many file sharing networks apparently failed.

Chris seems to have acted without the intention of harm to AG, and has since offered to do what he could to remedy the situation. That seems fair to me - all the talk of lawyers above has me somewhat nervous. Are we really so anxious to litigate in our society?

For those of you who would like to assign blame to Chris because a third party benefitted from the situation, think about this: in order for you to do anything online that could potentially violate a copyright, various ISPs (and possibly advertisers) are making money off of the traffic you bring with your activities. In this sense, any online copyright violation has the side effect that someone is profiting from it. Whether the situation changes when the third party is directly involved in the violation (as with LuLu) is yet another interesting topic.