RIAA sues Usenet

source: Wired

The Recording Industry Association of America's litigation strategy is taking a detour into the internet's Precambrian layer, suing a company that distributes the ancient decentralized message board known as Usenet.

Fargo, North Dakota-based Usenet.com is the target of the lawsuit (.pdf) filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, in which 14 recording companies allege the service "enables and encourages its customers to reproduce and distribute millions of infringing copies of Plaintiff's valuable copyrighted sound recordings."

The suit, filed Friday, is something of a throwback in the RIAA's recent litigation strategy. It targets an alleged facilitator of copyright theft instead of an individual pirate.

"They started by going after Napster, Aimster, Grokster, and after that they said, 'We're gonna go after individuals to see if we (can) get into the psyche of people that peer-to-peer file sharing is wrong,'" says Washington, D.C.-based copyright attorney Ross Dannenberg. "Now it has come full circle. Throughout this cycle, (Usenet) newsgroups have been ignored."

In the past four years, the RIAA has sued more than 20,000 people on allegations of copyright infringement. Two weeks ago, the association won a $222,000 judgment in the first such case to go to trial.

But Usenet's decentralized architecture means RIAA gumshoes can't easily trace uploaders, as they can on peer-to-peer services like Kazaa. That may have prompted the RIAA to focus on feed provider Usenet.com, which boasts about the anonymity it provides users.

"Shh ... quiet! We believe it’s no one’s business but your own what you do on the internet or in Usenet! We don’t log your activity. We don’t track your downloads," the company says on its website. It also offers an encrypted tunneling service, for an additional fee, to frustrate any efforts by ISPs or corporate network administrators to police downloads.

The Usenet network is a global, distributed message-board network that was created in the pre-internet days, when it relied on dialup modems for distribution. Now it's carried over the internet. Usenet.com redistributes the full Usenet feed for a subscription fee.

Usenet.com did not immediately return messages for comment.

Dannenberg suggests that the service could mount a defense by arguing that it is a service provider under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which would protect it from lawsuits if it responded to individual copyright complaints.

"The defense is that you fall within the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA," says Dannenberg. "This is material residing on a network at the direction of the users." Dannenberg says Usenet.com could argue it doesn't "have actual knowledge that the material is infringing, (and) if they are notified, they remove infringing works."

RIAA spokeswoman Cara Duckworth say that Usenet.com is no different from the peer-to-peer sites the RIAA has litigated against in the past.

"Usenet.com has promoted and advanced an illegal business model on the backs of the music community," Duckworth said in a statement. "It may be theft in a slightly different online form, but the illicit business model of usenet.com is little different than the Groksters of the world…. This business should not be allowed to remain a brazen outlaw that actively shirks its legal obligations."

"USENET" That's a name I haven't heard in a LONG time ... kind of like "Compuserve"

Right, but it's still rather popular world wide and was always my reply to people pushing an adult "send us money so we can stop porn theft" via "blogs"

If you're going after something, know where all the sources are. not just the trendy forum buzz words with people whom say, like you said, "That's a name I haven't heard in a LONG time"

This case, if followed, will dictate weather or not anti-piracy online will ever have a chance of being stopped. Usenet being the largest place to go after. And one of the hardest.