RIAA Sues Usenet.com

Several readers pointed us to Torrentfreak's coverage of the RIAA's latest move: the major record labels have launched a copyright infringement lawsuit against Usenet.com. The complaint, filed in the federal District Court in New York, accuses Usenet.com of providing access to millions of copyright-infringing files and slams it for touting its service as a "haven for those seeking pirated content." Usenet.com has been refusing the labels' requests to block access to alleged "copyright infringing groups."

Comments

Ahh crap

[Barny]

Guess IRC and finally Gopher will be up next :/

Re:Ahh crap

[Threni]

Took 'em years to get around to Usenet, though. Why? Perhaps they've only just heard about it?

Re:Ahh crap

[MightyMartian]

Took 'em years to get around to Usenet, though. Why? Perhaps they've only just heard about it?

It was me, I tell ya! That's right, Sammy, it was me. I was tired, ya see, tired of being your pirate pimp! So they's come it to me, see, these guys in a big Limo, see, and they tell's me, they says "Now look here, Thumbs, we knows you've got the goods on this Usenet gag. Spill the guts and we'll forget all about you selling Chinese Madonna CDs down by the docks."

Re:Ahh crap

[Otter]

Why? Perhaps they've only just heard about it?

Usenet.com isn't Usenet.* It's a Usenet access provider that markets itself pretty transparently (although not transparently enough to be illegal, I'd guess) as a warez service.

* Translation for all you "my hello.c is so 1337!" dweebs: Usenet.com != Usenet

Re:Ahh crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably because they can't track who is using it as easily as P2P programs or torrents. To go after users will require them to get logs from the providers, which won't happen without a subpoena. Also, it seems like they're going after Usenet.com because they were branding their service as a way to get copies of content. I wonder if they will go after other providers, who are advertising the ability to have 20GB/month worth of conversations with other usenet users, but make no mention of copyrighted material that is available?

Re:Ahh crap

[stefanlasiewski]

Don't confuse 'Usenet' with usenet.com. 'Usenet' is an internet-wide discussion system, with thousands of usenet nodes and of no central control.

Usenet.com provides paid access to Usenet newsgroups, and happened to land a nice DNS name.

Re:Ahh crap

[stefanlasiewski]

I think "domain name" might be a little more accurate.

ATM Machine. Here we go with the semantic arguments ;)

If we can have a 'DNS name server', a DNS name space and a Reserved Top Level DNS Names, why can't we say 'DNS name'?

I say 'DNS name' out of habit, because I used to work with people who used the term 'domain' to refer to a different kind of computer system, and 'Domain name' just caused confusion.

Re:Ahh crap

[entropy42]

I was the original owner of usenet.com - I registered it in 1994 or thereabouts. I sold it to someone (not sure if the present owner or not) for six figures in the late '90s.

Heh, a google search for paulp@usenet.com (my address at the time) yields exactly one result.

Re:Ahh crap

[Truesilver]

I'm calling the Department of Redundancy Department (AKA As the DRD Department)

Re:Ahh crap

[Korin43]

I think the point is that Usenet.com doesn't just have copywrited music, it's a major part of their advertising. Like if phone companies advertised as "A great way to plan terrorist attacks!" or something. (not that I think they should lose, I just think that it's more complicated than people are making it)

Re:Ahh crap

[sumdumass]

Actually, the laws in the US says copying and distributing. There really isn't anything they can do to you for just obtaining a copy. Well, maybe if you know it is pirated or stolen, but if you don't then there really isn't anything.

Think about this, If walmart imports DVD's from China to sell at their discount price that they are known for, then we find out that the contract with the movie companies never went through and they are all pirated, does that make you liable in some way for buying them. The answer is NO. Just like buying Smoke at the corner store or something at the pawn shop doesn't get you in trouble if it turns out to be from a hijacked semi load. It would be a little different then buying the same stuff out of a trunk in an alley though. But then that would likely be the receiving stolen property and nothing to do with copyright. There really isn't anything on the books about obtaining something pirated if you didn't copy or distribute it.

I read it for the articles

[Anonymous Coward]

Pay no attention to those alt.binaries. subscriptions.

Re:I read it for the articles

[nogginthenog]

Those groups are useless anyway. Everyone knows Usenet is a 7-bit system that doesn't support binaries...

Think of the pigeons!

[SirJorgelOfBorgel]

I guess pigeons will be next. Woe is ye, oh little beasties of high capacity and ludicrous latency!

Re:Think of the pigeons!

[n dot l]

LOL. I'd love to see this one hit the courts: "RIAA vs RFC 1149".

What's next?

[noidentity]

RIAA sues HTTP.com, RIAA sues USB 2.0, RIAA sues self?

Re:What's next?

[MrNemesis]

RIAA sues self?

Recursive Indictment Aggregating Association?

next up

[User 956]

The complaint, filed in the federal District Court in New York, accuses Usenet.com of providing access to millions of copyright-infringing files

Next up, the RIAA sues Nike, for their involvement in a "massive, global-scale sneaker net"

Re:Misread - RIAA USES Usenet

[LoonyMike]

Did you just say that RIAA uses some sort of suenet?

I warned you people!!

[commodoresloat]

See what happens when you talk about Usenet?

Re:I warned you people!!

[Xemu]

When someone discusses Usenet, inevitably, someone (me! me!) will point out that what the RIAA is doing is very similar to what Hitler and the Nazis were wishing for.

Hitler considered it appropriate for the state to adopt a view of what is a life worth living (ein lebenswertig Leben) and cast this ideal in aesthetic/ethical, or quasi-biological terms, and, he gave the state the means to the implementation of this ideal. The RIAA is, like Hitler, telling us how life should be lived and paints this ideal in ethical terms and they want to have the means to implement this ideal.

There. Did it. Happy now?

Re:I warned you people!!

[Chapter80]

your theoretical right to download a copyrighted britney spears album is equivalent to Auschwitz how exactly?

I think you missed the joke.

Re:I warned you people!!

[Mean Variance]

Hitler considered it appropriate for the state to adopt a view of what is a life worth living (ein lebenswertig Leben) and cast this ideal in aesthetic/ethical, or quasi-biological terms, and, he gave the state the means to the implementation of this ideal. The RIAA is, like Hitler, telling us how life should be lived and paints this ideal in ethical terms and they want to have the means to implement this ideal. There. Did it. Happy now?

Godwin's Law has been triggered. Stop the thread.

Re:Misread - RIAA USES Usenet

[Stormx2]

I misread the title as "RIAA Uses Usenet.com".

Wow, what a difference two letters make, huh?

Have you also noticed that some things are green... and that some aren't? The excitement never ends.

Does not compute.

[IcebergSlim]

WTF? Usenet predates the WWW and is essentially just a protocol; they might as well sue "email" as well.

Please

[blhack]

Please, for the love of god, don't let this story go any further....please nobody post this to digg, or reddit, or any other place that will get it even more publicity. What the MAFRIAA wants is for all of us to be up in arms, and if we get the 14 year old ZOMFG HACK-ZORES on the case that is exactly what will happen.

usenet will go the way of bittorrent.

NOthing to see here folks, move along. /quickly now //QUICKLY!

Re:Please

[moore.dustin]

What way did bittorrent go exactly? My 'torrent use' has not been effected in the least from anything the RIAA or bittorrent themselves have done. As for usenet, even if it is shut down, only the name will take a hit. The whole community will reorganize 3 days later at a new domain, the same community, and a new vigor of secrecy. I mean really, the RIAA cannot do anything to stop us(Us being geeks/nerds). No matter what they do, we change our ways, improve our position against them(RIAA), and continue to do what we want, share files. Darknets and private trackers are already commonplace because of the RIAA - it just goes to show that the only thing that can control what the community does is the community itself.

Okay, newbies, usenet.com is NOT usenet

[SmallFurryCreature]

Geez, what is this, digg? usenet.com is just a company that gives payed access to usenet. The RIAA can't sue usenet anymore then it could sue HTTP (not that it wouldn't want to) but it sure as hell can sue Usenet.com the same as it can sue a company employing a webserver that hosts copyrighted files.

I have no idea if usenet.com can be considered guilty under current laws, they do have the files in question on their servers and charge people money to download them, so they are directly profitting from these files. On the other hand, by the nature of usenet they have no control over what appears on their servers (they better not be blocking kiddie porn or they lost that defence).

Are they a phone company just passing information, or are they a filesharer profitting from doing so.

Intresting case BUT stop pretending that the RIAA is stupid enough to sue USENET, it is sueing a company that sells access to usenet. People here are quick to blame politicians for not knowing enough, but count the posts that don't even seem to know the difference between these two.

Re:Okay, newbies, usenet.com is NOT usenet

[Kjella]

It might come down to advertising. Selling a knife is legal. Selling a knife as "the perfect murder weapon" is not. There's a long and difficult story trying to figure this out, you can read Shooting the Messenger: ISP Liability for Contributory Copyright Infringement [pdf] for the 16-page brief summary. On the one hand you have the Sony vs Betamax shield (you can't control the users) on the other you have Grokster etc. (you can't advertise it as a pirating service). Some of the Usenet providers have been making ads that are dangerously close to inciting illegal activity. I think newsgroups will survive, I'm not sure usenet.com does.

Re:Two very silly companies

[BosstonesOwn]

Well back to stealing porno mags from the old mans stash.

God I feel bad for ripping off my 80 year old dad's playboys from the 70's ! Oh wow never knew there could be that much hair down there !

Re:Maybe you should have done a FUCKING search of

[Barny]

Hrmm, angry you are...

I sense the AOL is strong in this one, yes?

Pointless

[jemenake]

If the RIAA's main complaint is that Usenet.com is offering access to alt.binaries.*, that's a little pointless. Now that NZB files are all the rage, the various pieces of each posting don't even have to be in one newsgroup, because the reference them by message-id. So, I could chop "Stairway to Heaven" into 20 pieces, post one piece to soc.singles, another piece to alt.flame, etc. etc... and then post the NZB somewhere and any NZB-aware program will be able to go get them. So... trying to shut off alt.binaries isn't going to stop anything.

First rule of Usenet

[gmezero]

USENET FAQ

Posted: 00:00:00 UTC on January 1, 1970
Version 0.0.1

Authro: Kibble
Group: Alt.First.Post

The first rule of Usenet is you don't talk about Usenet

Re:First rule of Usenet

[Obfuscant]

You misspelled kibo.

Re:First rule of Usenet

[meringuoid]

You misspelled kibo.

As is traditional, although his grep patterns are atrociously complex and match most common variations on the Name that must not be spelt out.

(At one time, I hear people even avoided discussion of skiboots, for fear of invoking He Who Greps from the depths of the newsfeed...)

Re:Flawed logic?

[droopycom]

Actually, usenet.com (like any host taking part of the usenet network) is actually hosting the content.

Many usenet host (in universities or ISP) do not store binary groups (just because it take too much space on their servers). But some ISP do, and just turn a blind eye on the piracy, because they know they will attract more customers.

Thats what make it so attractive for pirated content: this are professional grade servers on the other side.

I'm surprised it took RIAA/MPAA so long to go after them.

Re:The average user does not know about usenet

[HTH NE1]

And if I remember correctly, it takes some work to create a new group. Not so much under alt.*. As I recall some misbehaving servers would automatically newgroup a newsgroup just by receiving a posting for it. (Do they still bar any proposals for the creation of binaries groups under rec? Do any comp.binaries.* groups survive today?)

A benefit of Usenet is that it is a push technology, not a pull. You could theoretically identify posters--or at least their servers by analyzing bang paths (and determining their forge point)--but downloading was largely anonymous... when NNTP servers were widely distributed and not just in the hands of a few businesses selling access to their massive feeds. You can't find an open NNTP server anymore that lets anyone post. It's far more vulnerable now as a result.

I remember the days of Usenet when porn was not plentiful and you could launch a DDoS on an FTP site just by posting a message that there was porn there. The attack was even more effective when the porn allegation was true.

There is a reason why Usenet was forgotten: it was the birthplace of spam. Though term spam was first coined on IRC from someone on a channel just sending the word "spam" repeatedly to disrupt a discussion and leaving, it manifested into the form of the modern scourge first on Usenet.

Except some of the binaries groups, where the porn spam is about as good or even better than the actual postings from individuals.

Re:Ahh crap-DISMANTLE ONE SERVER AT A TIME

[Nom du Keyboard]

Usenet.com isn't Usenet.* It's a Usenet access provider that markets itself pretty transparently (although not transparently enough to be illegal, I'd guess) as a warez service.

Don't think that Usenet.com is not usenet, and therefore usenet is safe. By now you should know that the RIAA tries to take one case against a weak defendant, and then leverage that win in the courts against everyone else. If they can win against Usenet.com and their servers, expect legal letters to go out to every other usenet node telling them to shut down, filter groups (yeah, like that would work), or face a lawsuit against a billion dollar corporation.

This really is a big deal on a new front, and if they don't lose big time here, they'll try to roll over everyone else.

The truth is that the RIAA truly believes that they are more important than absolutely everybody else in the world!

Re:I've seen the trickle down effects of piracy

[SomeJoel]

Most slashdotters that are against the RIAA/MPAA for their tactics would also be against the piracy you described. Typically, this community accepts "personal use" type file-sharing, where the song/movie is not then sold on the black market. In fact, the RIAA would be perfectly in the right to sue in this case. However, they should sue the pirating karaoke bars that are making profits because of piracy, not the medium from which they obtained them. Furthermore, they should not have to pay $220,000 per track in any case, but rather something more along the lines of actual loss (maybe a grand total of $300,000 as you cited in your example).

Re:Misread - RIAA USES Usenet

[davecarlotub]

(25 points to whoever catches that reference...)
I'm assuming you didn't mean gamecube.

Usenet is pretty vulnerable.

[Kadin2048]

Yep. Not only that -- the massive storage and bandwidth -- but you need to get a newsfeed. And that's not as easy as it used to be, when you could basically ask the sysop of your local university nicely. I'm not even sure what the commercial news servers would charge for a real UUCP newsfeed, or if they'd sell you one at all (why would they want to create competition for themselves?).

I'm not sure how many high-completion, long-retention news servers are around, but I suspect it's way, way down from what it used to be. It probably wouldn't take too many targeted lawsuits to, if not actually wipe out Usenet (that's impossible), but to at least make it very different from what it's like now. You could definitely make commercial services unprofitable, push it underground, and force people to eliminate binaries or at least shorten their completion/retentions a lot.

Re:Bollocks. Of course it is!

[Tumbleweed]

*horrors*

Let's hope they don't go after web.com and ftp.com next!

Re:Ahh crap-DISMANTLE ONE SERVER AT A TIME

[Anonymous Coward]

This seems like it there may be a precedent for this case already:

http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/dltr/articles/2006dltr0019.html

Good Luck Riaa, Usenet servers are ISP's in law.

[plasmacutter]

to quote this informed poster from a previous usenet related infringement story.

The problem for the MPAA is that Usenet providers have been deemed to be 17 USC 512(a) service providers. That means they can't be successfully sued for copyright infringement for material traversing their networks, and they need not even respond to takedown notices for such material. Yep, it's their own law, the DMCA, working against them. Though before that law, the Netcom case left them pretty hamstrung anyway.

Let's hope Usenet.com has good lawyers who know about this.

I'm waiting for them to sue localhost

[r_jensen11]

16,548,583 songs available? And I can download them at blazing fast speeds? Those bastards are going to fear our wrath!

Re:I've seen the trickle down effects of piracy

[kindbud]

So by your +5 Interesting logic, if instead you had a clothing store and your competition was selling counterfeit designer labels and hurting your business, the proper response response by the designer would be to sue the trucking company that delivered the counterfeit clothing?

Re:Ahh crap-DISMANTLE ONE SERVER AT A TIME

[cHiphead]

Thats when you call in us IT "Consultants." If we can't dazzle them with brilliance, we can baffle them with bullshit. ;)

Cheers.

Re:Ahh crap-DISMANTLE ONE SERVER AT A TIME

[TheoMurpse]

For those who don't want to take the time to read the "iBrief" (wtf?), it says that AOL's usenet service should not have qualified AOL under the safe harbor provisions. However, the article uses a very narrow interpretation of the definition of "ISP": a party that offers transmission, routing, or provision of connections for digital online communications, between or among points specified by a user, of material of the user's choosing. The article says that the user does not control where the usenet post goes after they make it, so the user has not specified a point of transmission, so with respect to usenet, AOL does not qualify as an ISP.

However, the user specifies "rec.arts.whatever" as the end point. The user is oblivious to the IPs and server locations of various ISPs' usenet storage machines, but users don't know the actual IPs of Youtube.com, yet when they specify "youtube" as the location for an uploaded video, no one is suggesting that this technicality disqualifies Youtube from the safe harbor provisions. Youtube's video storage is probably on more than one machine with more than one IP, so, similar to Youtube, usenet is a web of servers, and the user does not choose a specific server as its target. Instead, the user chooses some nebulous "site" to send their data to. The site itself is not a real location, but an interconnected web of servers.

Email is similar.