A judge's decision could be drawn narrowly enough that a company such as Napster could be held responsible for contributing to copyright infringement without setting a broad precedent that links to copyrighted material are themselves illegal, they say. MP3Board contests this notion. If the links it turns up as a search engine are illegal, then so could be the links turned up by a Yahoo or an AltaVista, company representatives argue. Otherwise, any site that aggregates links would be guilty of copyright infringement. Nevertheless, the Yahoos and AltaVistas of the world have been slow to support MP3Board or any of the other defendants.
Allies have in some cases come from the traditional media.
The New York Times Co. has supported 2600 Enterprises' right to link to the contested DeCSS software, noting that it, too, provided links to the controversial code. This would be unprecedented in traditional media. The MPAA and 2600 Enterprises are expected to wrap up their court arguments today or tomorrow. A judge could have a decision in that case as soon as a week or 10 days after that time. Napster is slated to meet record industry attorneys in court tomorrow, where a judge will determine whether the music-swapping service should be temporarily shut down while the industry's case waits for a full trial.