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RIAA Sues Backbone ISPs to Censor Website
prostoalex writes "Music labels filed a lawsuit against major Internet service providers for not blocking access to Listen4Ever.com, music site located in China. The defendants in the suit include AT&T Broadband, Cable & Wireless USA, Sprint Corp., Advanced Network Services and UUNET Technologies." Wow.
Just viewing the site launched endless popup ad windows some of which resized themselves to fill the whole screen, popped more windows when you closed the old ones, etc.
Interestingly, the actual mp3's come from an entirely different set of domains, that don't appear related to the gateway site and probably aren't hosted in China. The site being sued over is more like a portal (link farm) than an actual mp3 host. It has tons of "legitimate" advertising including audio devices, Visa cards, etc. But I couldn't stand looking at it long, because of all the damn popups.
Anyway, this isn't some warez kiddie's server, it's a highly commercial site, and it astounds me if RIAA is really having trouble finding its owners (asking its advertisers where they send their checks is an obvious approach).
The copyright infringement suit, filed in Manhattan federal court, seeks a court order requiring the defendants to block Internet communications that travel through their systems to and from the Listen4ever site.
I am a RoadRunner user and have no problem accessing the site. If AOLTW is going to sue somebody to block communications, why haven't they taken this "simple" measure within their own systems?
I can't help but wonder if some of this is self-inflicted. As various corporate entities capture the ISP market and begin to play fast and loose with content control, they have began to give up the "common carrier" stance that has been the ISP's protection in the past. Once an ISP is no longer a common carrier, they are immediately liable for any kind of traffic coming through their network.
The only reservation I have on this point is that I'm not sure all the parties involved have taken steps that could be considered abandoning common carrier status. For example, while I'm sure I remember seeing AT&T Broadband taking such actions, I don't remember seeing anything from UUNET that would expose them to this kind of action.
Of course, previous establishment of common carrier status for ISPs was under a slightly different political climate. The attitude towards the Net has changed. New deals have been done in business and politics. All bets could very well be off.
Er, don't buy music from recording labels? The best way to express your disapproval towards any business or group of businesses is to not buy their stuff.
Of course, as we've seen (bnet vs. Warcraft 3, MPAA vs. LOTR DVD), sticking to your principles is pretty tough. For example, I bought the new Linkin Park CD because I'm against the RIAA and, as it turns out, a hippocrite.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Also in response to Renraku's comment above.
The trouble is, there is a cost to blacklisting : violation of their contractual peering/carrier responsibilities. They have agreed to carry a lot of traffic. Some for money, some in exchange for peering, but they've agreed to carry it nevertheless. If they just cave, then they open themselves to suits from all of the people they've contracted with for breach of contract.
Now, true, you can't contract to do something illegal and have the contract be enforcable. However, they need to make a reasonable effort to fulfill their contractual obligations, which would include fighting back. Additionally, this is a civil matter, and not a criminal one, so even if they fight and loose, they could still be drug into court over failure to deliver. They may win such cases, but if they just cave to the RIAA, they can't also just cave to all of their customers. And their customers aren't small fry either -- I believe UUNET now requires you to have 3 geographically distant POP's connected by 10 Mbit to even vaguely consider peering.
Also, corporations are fully aware of the idea of setting a bad precident (shit, is that spelled right? 'prolly not). Every time they let somebody dictate what they can carry, it makes it that much easier for the next person who wants another IP block to be stopped at the border. The big baddass backbone routers already have oversized routing tables--they simply can't afford to add any unnecessary entries. And if adding these entries causes service to slip, well, most big backbones include all sorts of lovely penalty provisions against themselves in their carrier contracts, because they know that they can charge extra for the ironclad guaruntee.
No, they all but have to fight. They can either fight the RIAA in one big battle, or fight their customers in a hundred big battles. 1 is a lot less than 100...
Yes and no. I've got RoadRunner, and Listen4Ever.com automagically routes me to MP3Mediaworld.com, which looks nothing like the cached version of Listen4Ever that Google gives me. So, there blocking it, but in a backhanded way that doesn't even let the average mp3 leech know what they're missing.
Do not confuse duty with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different.Duty is a debt you owe to yourself.
The arguments about lower quality music selling CDs is one of the two core factors of the RIAA business model. If you like a song played on FM or via any MP3 provider, you'll buy the CD, it's a lot less hassle than a 50 meg CD audio and you get full quality and all the nuances you paid for when you got your big bucks stereo or Dolby Pro Logic system.
The difference? If I'm an independent artist, I can upload to any P2P or any Internet Radio provider that's left. If listeners like what they here on P2P, they'll tell their friends. If the owner/DJ of a Internet Radio station likes it, they'll play it on the "air". No money changed hands.
As an independent artist, (which I'm not) I can NOT get access to a FM radio station playlist without paying a shitload of money to an "independent promoter" who pays the radio station in an under or over the counter transaction. Even given the money, the good timeslots go to the regular customers, all of which are RIAA labels.
So RIAA labels have a monopoly on FM radio content. That's where the sheeple go to hear "new music". Anything you hear on commercial radio is a commercial for an RIAA label band or musician. (A series of Salon articles lays out the whole deal) That's the OTHER core factor in the RIAA label business model, exclusive access to FM radio.
If an artist goes platinum without record company backing, he'll have made $5M-$10M. If one goes platinum for the first time with a label behind him, he might break even against his record label advances, partially due to legit advances but mainly due to Enron-style economics.
The day one goes platinum without a record label, the business model used by all the RIAA labels just went into the dumper.
Metallica will hear "this guy went platinum and made 5 MILLION DOLLARS OFF HIS FIRST RECORD?"... and I predict they will be among the very first to tell their lawyers "GET US OUT OF THIS RECORD LABEL CONTENT NOW!!!". However, this will probably be page 10 of Billboard, that issue of the magazine will be the first "all lawsuit" issue.
With Internet Radio and P2P unplugged, the record industry can say to an artist "You make a living with us or not at all, without us, the only people you can sell CDs to are the ones who show up at your gigs."
Without exclusive control by labels over any method a musician can use to get to the public, all a RIAA label is, is a ruinously expensive source of venture capital, both in terms of money and personal integrity, and if they change their mind about promoting a record, the musician can;t legally work.
Anyone who talks about piracy is either a conscious shill for the industry or parroting industry propaganda. Check out what Courtney Love and Janis Ian have to say about this. (presumably you know how to use Google)
MP3s and songs played back on analog FM are promotional tools, NOT products.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Strange. Lets take a little look at the this website/server.
x t/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,video/x-mng,image/pn g,image/jpeg,image/gif;q=0.2,text/css,*/*;q=0.1
A ccept-Language: en-us, en;q=0.50
/. junk filter bites.
Proxomitron
GET http://www.listen4ever.com/ HTTP/1.1
Host: www.listen4ever.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0; I USE MOZILLA, Support Mozilla www.mozilla.org)
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,te
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1, utf-8;q=0.66, *;q=0.66
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
+++RESP 112+++
HTTP/1.0 302 Moved Temporarily
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Date: Sat, 17 Aug 2002 04:25:24 GMT
Location: http://www.mp3mediaworld.com
Content-Length: 149
Content-Type: text/html
Set-Cookie: ASPSESSIONIDGQGQQVBY=HNHJFELBEKKDNLLOJBCNPHHP; path=/
X-Cache: MISS from sexy
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
+++CLOSE 112+++
Lynx
[iw@sexy] ~ >lynx -noredir -dump -source http://www.listen4ever.com/
snip
This object may be found @ HREF="http://www.mp3mediaworld.com"
nmap
Interesting ports on (61.136.61.40):
(The 1542 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed)
Port State Service
21 ftp
25 smtp
80 http
85 mit-ml-dev
135 loc-srv
139 netbios-ssn
1021 unknown
1025 listen
1030 iad1
1433 ms-sql-s
3389 msrdp
6666 irc-serv
Port 6666, looks like some gnutella clone or something..
-> repeats this line "f:\songlib/-NeAmL/IN/s/w1r`O"
I think this is a persons workstation, so they are redirecting to save bandwidth. (IMHO)
BTW,