RIAA aims lawyers at usenet newsgroup service
'Worse than P2P'
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The Recording Industry Ass. of America has now attacked a company that provides access to internet newsgroups.
Last Friday, RIAA lawyers chucked a federal lawsuit at Usenet.com, claiming that the Fargo, North Dakota newsgroup service "enables and encourages" people to swap copyrighted music.
The organization that represents the country's big-name record labels is convinced that Usenet.com infringes copyrights in ways that extend well beyond peer-to-peer file-sharing services.
"[Usenet.com] provides essentially the same functionality that P2P services such as Napster, Aimster, Grokster, and Kazaa did (prior to being enjoined by the federal courts) - knowingly providing the site and facilities for users to upload and download copyrighted works - except that [it] goes further than even the P2P services to facilitate and encourage copyright infringement by users," the complaint reads.
Usenet.com offers web mavens anonymous access to over 120,000 usenet newsgroups, those bulletin-board-like server networks that have facilitated online data swapping since the 80s. Some of these are ASCII-based groups that serve up text-based info, but as Usenet.com points out, others are binary groups that serve up files, including MP3s.
"Today’s hottest way of sharing MP3 files over the Internet is Usenet; forget about all the peer-to-peer software applications, which quickly become outdated," reads the Usenet.com site. "Usenet allows everyone around the world to share their files on a worldwide network of peer servers and make them available to any member of this worldwide network."
According to Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital watchdog, the RIAA has long fought behind the scenes to shutdown access to binary newsgroups.
"I know just from talking to lawyers from recording industry lawyers that they've had their eye on usenet groups for a quite awhile," von Lohmann told The Reg. "My impression is that most commercial ISPs have given up on binary newsgroups under pressure from the entertainment industry."
Next page: The Grokster analogy
COMMENTS
I must preview my comments
UUCP - UNIX to UNIX Copy Program. Damn, damn.
Uunet pre-dates the Internet
Usenet and it's predecessor uunet (not the ex-ISP) existed before the Internet as we know it (and even ARPANET).
Back in the days of modems, there was a network (topoligical net, not physical connections) of UNIX systems which regularly dialed each other up via telephone lines with UUCP (UNIX-to-UNIX Copy Protocol). This was used to exchange mail and newsgroups. This is where sendmail and nntpd came from. It was used extensively by educational users of UNIX to post mods to the UNIX source code (which was available at media distribution costs to University and Collages for non-commercial and non-teaching purposes). My word. How history repeats itself! Bit like Linux then, but a smaller community.
For those who remember it, mail addressing used to look something like (and I mean something, because my memory is shot) user!host1!host2@host3, where you would specify the complete set of hops to get to the destination system. This was fortunatly simplified by smart hosts like ihlpa (an AT&T run system in Indian Hill, Chicago) and others that used to act as mail routers. It is only recently (last 8 years?) that source-routing of mails was blocked by the default sendmail setup. Email and newsgroup posts often took hours or days to get to their destinations, depending on the polling interval of the systems in the path.
Ancient history now, but interesting.
I'll get my coat for being a sad geek.
RIAA Faggots
Soon the Indie scene will overtake the Corporate-controlled cookie-cutter Pop garbage flooding the market today and the RIAA will die with it (and hopefully MTV & VH1). The RIAA are not musicians or Record Producers, but they are the leeches in between that steal monies and rights from the artists as well as the public.. Kind of like Sports Agents..
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