Usenet.com May Find Safe Harbor From RIAA lawsuit

Daneal writes "Ars Technica has some interesting analysis of the RIAA's lawsuit against Usenet.com. There's reason to believe that Usenet.com — and most other Usenet providers — could qualify for protection under the DMCA's Safe Harbor provision. 'The DMCA's Safe Harbor provision provides protection for ISPs from copyright infringement lawsuits as long as they take down offending material once they are served with a notice of infringement. "Whether the Safe Harbor applies is the central legal question that is going to be raised," EFF senior staff attorney Fred von Lohmann told Ars. An RIAA spokesperson tells Ars that the group has issued "many" takedown notices to Usenet.com, but von Lohmann says that the volume of takedown notices isn't what counts. "The DMCA's Safe Harbor makes it very clear," von Lohmann said. "The number of notices doesn't matter as long as you take the infringing content down."'"

Comments

USENET?

[idontgno]

They wanna take down USENET?

And they're gonna target a single NNTP provider to do it?

OMFG, USENET was P2P before P2P was invented. It's so distributed, diffuse, and attributionless that it's practically untouchable.

Who keeps picking out windmills for RIAA to tilt at? Their legal attack strategist needs to put down the crack pipe and step away from his desk.

Seriously...

Re:USENET?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some ISPs don't provide newsgroup access anymore, make it a pain to get or have limits on uploading or downloading binaries. RIAA pressure could make this the norm.

Services like Usenet.com and Giganews are quite possibly vulnerable, as we see from this lawsuit. Maybe they'll try to go for customer logs next?

It may not be possible to take down Usenet, but it is quite possible to make it a little more difficult or risky than it is now for the average college student to access binaries.

Although I think the real point of this is to instill paranoia. RIAA lawsuits are a more than anything else a scare tactic and an effective PR campaign designed to instill fear in casual downloaders. That may be why they're going after Usenet.com instead of Giganews or similar sites, to instill some confusion and so that the aforementioned college student thinks he's at risk of a lawsuit himself if he downloads from Usenet (no matter what provider he uses.) My theory at least, take it with a grain of salt.

Common Carrier Defense ...

[xmas2003]

Since Usenet just publishes other people's stuff, don't they (at least somewhat) qualify for common carrier classification (similar to phone companies) in that the the content is someone else's?

Along these lines, what about Google/other search engines that show "copyrighted" content - either in the snippet or in their cache?

Re:Seem to remember...

[guruevi]

That's RIAA FUD. From experience in a webhosting company, RIAA will just send you a notice that there was illegal music found and just give a listing of ALL similar content (like: delete all MP3's although only one is actually infringing) on the site even though it might not be infringing (copyright law DOES have exceptions) or the site might have been hacked before.

They probably refuse to take down content that is legally protected or that is legally not a full work and even if they take it down, within a few minutes another version might be up again so it sounds like the RIAA is going to have to send a lot of notices to take every single Usenet post down.