In the southern district of New York, the Recording Industry Association of America filed a lawsuit on October 12 saying that Usenet newsgroups contain "millions of copyrighted sound recordings" in violation of federal law. Usenet.com, based in Fargo, N.D., boasts that signing up for an account "gives you access to millions of MP3 files and also enables you to post your own files the same way and share them with the whole world." That’s what caught the RIAA’s eye. With a quote like that, the organization has the backing it needs to win in court.
Many ISPs, universities and newsgroup archives offer Usenet. If RIAA succeeds, they may not stop with Usenet.com. The lawsuit claims Usenet.com encourages its customers to pay up to $19 a month by enticing them with copyrighted music, and asks for a permanent injunction barring the company from "aiding, encouraging, enabling, inducing, causing, materially contributing to, or otherwise facilitating" copyright infringement.
News source: News.com
Many ISPs, universities and newsgroup archives offer Usenet. If RIAA succeeds, they may not stop with Usenet.com. The lawsuit claims Usenet.com encourages its customers to pay up to $19 a month by enticing them with copyrighted music, and asks for a permanent injunction barring the company from "aiding, encouraging, enabling, inducing, causing, materially contributing to, or otherwise facilitating" copyright infringement.
News source: News.com
exactly! cause it's like once you hit a certain point with money, it's rather useless to get more of it.... which im sure a good chunk of those higher up RIAA guys already have and then some.
Of course those millions of MP3s don't have to be illegal, but surely they'd be best advertising a platform to distribute files and not one to find the latest boy band album.
not the smartest thing the riaa's done, i must say. maybe they should just leave this one alone
+1 !!!
What are they gonna do, have the Internet shut down?
so in a way they actually almost did.
so in a way they actually almost did.
Let's stop and wonder for a second why that didn't happen.........
RIAA need to seriously look at their mission statement!
Old music is already free of their usurious tyranny, while the newest/biggest musicians have begun cutting them out entirely.
The studios should go back to focusing on television and features, which have a huge cost of investment and are therefore currently out of the ability of the common man with a home computer to duplicate - unlike any musician these days. They can record, master, and distribute out of their basement on their own equipment for peanuts.
It was only a matter of time before the artists learned they no longer needed middle men who take 95% of their fees just to grease recording, promotional, and distribution wheels they already completely owned and controlled to begin with.
The Internet, and P2P in particular, is just digital radio in its purest form, folks. We figured that out with Napster. The studios are still wondering why they're up to their necks in online tar while we, the digital consumer monkeys they seem to hate so much, throw rocks at their whining walnut-brained heads.
Good riddance.
I mean, come on... It's been there 27+ years and they've only just noticed? Dumbasses.
It will be utterly impossible for them to stop it, due to the way it's decentralised and how the data propagates. They'd have to actually shut the entire system down, and the only way to do that is to shut down the entire internet.
They've JUST discovered Usenet, Wow what a revelation!
The best the RIAA could ever do is force usenet hosting companies to move north to Canada or Sweden or...etc., etc.. And what have they accomplished at that point? Nothing. Just more FUD.
Their goal is to maintain their dying stranglehold on the music industry as long as they can...to milk every penny they can out of their old-school distribution paradigm.
It's a shame really, they have these huge libraries of music from the past centuries. And only < 1% of it is available to any of us at any time as consumers and only for a very small market. What they really should be doing is releasing their entire back catalogs worldwide. With digital distribution, they can sell millions of artists to billions of customers, instead of a handful of drivel bands to the few million teeny boppers who still listen to generic boy band pap.
The online distribution model opens up DIVERSITY in choice of content AND available customers. When an obscure blues artist from the 40's suddenly becomes all the range in Shanghai, it's just as profitable to the bottom line as the weak sales of a has-been Britney Spears album. And it would be happening all over the world.
I mean, come on... It's been there 27+ years and they've only just noticed? Dumbasses.
Um, there was no internet 27 years ago.
There were bulletin boards though!
I mean, come on... It's been there 27+ years and they've only just noticed? Dumbasses.
Um, there was no internet 27 years ago.
Usenet, just like IRC and Telnet, predates the WWW. It was born back in 1979 and you wouldn't believe some of the things it's been used for in the past 28 years...
rightiiiiiies....
i know its actually almost exclusively for copy-righted music, but still... dagnit
Glassed Silver:mac
They are like rabid dogs.
world would be a better place without americans.
world would be a better place without americans.
world would be a better place without ignorant mouth-breathers like you that waste what little clean oxygen we have left spouting useless babel like you have done. Go find your rock and go back under it
LOL. I don't agree with his statement, but yours is some serious BS to. Typical big headed yank.
LOL. I don't agree with his statement, but yours is some serious BS to. Typical big headed yank.
agreed.
It's...well..wrong. I bet the majority of RIAA employees work there for one reason and one reason only....to feed their kids, put clothes on their backs and a roof over their heads, so how about a little more tact.
It's...well..wrong. I bet the majority of RIAA employees work there for one reason and one reason only....to feed their kids, put clothes on their backs and a roof over their heads, so how about a little more tact.
yeh, and they stop other people from feeding their own kids and getting clothes and having a house
I don't like the RIAA, but you're totally deluded.
I don't like the RIAA, but you're totally deluded.
And your a complete fool if you think that isn't true. There many thousands of lives the RIAA has totally ruined, literally. Over something that cost them NOTHING.
America plain sucks anymore. Our justice system is a complete joke. Our country is run by a bunch of lieing idiots in both parties who do nothing but cater to whomever has the money (RIAA/MPAA).
Perhaps you'd like to sue your local gunshop when there's a big sign about home security above some 150 rounds per minute cap-in-yo-ass sub-machine gun as that advertises the unlawful slaughtering capabilities of the product in question.
Oh, wait. Arming bears counts as prior and invalidating art. So that's alright then.
Usenet.com is just the obvious starting point if you want to stop the pie stealers start with piestealers.com.
The RIAA will win this by throwing however much money it takes at the case and that will give them precedent which will make it easier when they sue all the other providers.
This will mean that providers will either shutdown or start to filter the content they carry and usenet will be back to nothing but text files.
If you read the documents they aren't just suing because usenet.com advertised their users ability to access MP3s etc. they are also suing them for owning servers which hold the copyrighted materials on them and allowing their users to post copyrighted materials.
Of course it won't stop the pirates because they'll just move to another method.
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