NEW YORK - The Recording Industry Association of America filed a lawsuit on Oct. 12 against Usenet.com, claiming that the service enables illegal downloading and sharing of copyrighted recordings.
In a suit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, 14 recording companies claim that Usenet.com "enables and encourages its customers to reproduce and distribute millions of infringing copies of plaintiffs' valuable copyrighted sound recordings."
The suit is part of the RIAA's recent strategy of targeting alleged facilitators of copyright infringement instead of individual consumers. The association has filed copyright-infringement suits against more than 20,000 people in the past four years and won a $222,000 judgment earlier this month in the first such case to go to trial.
According to First Amendment attorney Larry Walters, since Usenet was in existence well before the World Wide Web, it can't be compared to Napster, as the RIAA has attempted to do. Usenet.com essentially is an Internet-service provider and may be shielded from liability by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's safe harbor provisions, he added.
"The courts need to be careful not to impose significant liabilities on service providers because the functioning of the Internet depends on their immunity," Walters told AVN Online. "No host is going to stay in business very long if it can be sued every time one of its customers engages in copyright infringement. There may be extenuating circumstances with respect to Usenet.com, which could result in a finding of liability in that particular case. But I am generally uncomfortable with the concept of imposing intellectual-property liability on an Internet-service provider, for all the policy reasons that Congress recognized when it crafted the safe harbor provisions in the DMCA."
Established in 1980, Usenet has been a source for downloads of copyrighted materials, yet this is the first time it has been targeted for what the RIAA has called facilitating copyright infringement. The North Dakota-based service redistributes traffic from the global Usenet message-board network.
RIAA spokeswoman Cara Duckworth said Usenet.com does not differ from the peer-to-peer sites the RIAA already has sued.
"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."
