FilmArea.NeT

This article has been published at RLSLOG.net - visit our site for full content.

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.

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. 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. Go do some joga Cara and read few articles about Usenet meanwhile, that’s getting ridiculous.

Source: Wired 

more at RLSLOG.net