MonaVie is the Next Napster?

MonaVie and Napster seem to have a lot in common

Here’s the Napster case description directly from Wikipedia:

The music industry made the following claims against Napster:

(1) That its users were directly infringing the plaintiff’s copyright;
(2) That Napster was liable for contributory infringement of the plaintiff’s copyright; and
(3) That Napster was liable for vicarious infringement of the plaintiff’s copyright.

The court found Napster liable on all three claims.

Napster lost the case in the District Court and appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Although the Ninth Circuit found that Napster was capable of commercially significant non-infringing uses, it affirmed the District Court’s decision. On remand, the District Court ordered Napster to monitor the activities of its network and to block access to infringing material when notified of that material’s location. Napster was unable to do this, and so shut down its service in July 2001.

Let’s see what we have here:
1) The company’s users were directly breaking the law
2) The company was liable for contributing to them breaking the law
3) The company was liable for vicariously breaking the law

The company went back and said that it’s product can be used in significant number of legitimately legal cases or which the court agreed on the condition that they stop the illegal uses. The company was unable to do this and shut down it’s business.

Now go back to the above synopsis of Napster and substitute “The company” for MonaVie. Doesn’t that seem ominous for MonaVie? What’s different? If I were a MonaVie distributor, I’d be very careful not to count on the income stream to feed my family.

The CEO in a Newsweek already said that it is unable to filter out the illegal activity:

Meanwhile an 18-person compliance department investigates distributors suspected of making false claims—although with a million sales people on the books, that’s easier said than done. “It’s next to impossible,” Larsen concedes, “like herding cats.”

Originally posted 2009-05-14 14:44:34.

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