Many folks have been using the newsgroups network as a file leeching service, now it seems one of the service providers is in receipt of a lawsuit.
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/e3i66abf6954df1d43f75ac96b95a3324c4The suit claims that the usenet.com service sells access to content that includes millions of unauthorized music files and "touts its service as a haven for those seeking pirated content."
Typically, a usenet system is made up of a large number of computer servers that communicate with each other. An individual user reads and posts messages to a company's local computer server. Messages are stored on that server and then exchanged with other servers, often globally.
The complaint, filed late Friday in the federal District Court in New York, alleges that Fargo, N.D.-based usenet.com enables and encourages its customers to reproduce and distribute millions of the labels' recordings without permission.
Specifically, the complaint alleges, usenet.com loads online bulletin boards or "newsgroups" obtained from the usenet network onto its server. It then sells access to the newsgroups that it has chosen to host on its usenet.com service. The suit claims that many of the newsgroups that usenet.com chooses to offer "are explicitly dedicated to copyright infringement."
Users post copyrighted recordings to these to the newsgroups on usenet.com's servers, the suit says, identifying them by artist and title. The works are then "propagated worldwide," allowing millions of users of the usenet network to copy "with ease and anonymity," the complaint alleges.
The suit also claims that usenet.com "boasts" that "its service is the best way to get 'free' music now that 'file sharing websites are getting shut down...'"
The suit claims that usenet.com has been repeatedly notified by the labels to remove infringing recordings from its servers, but it refuses to remove them and continues to carry infringing newsgroups.
This new RIAA "jihad" against yet another file distribution method is merely to try to obtain some legal cracks they can leverage, as at the moment they have no valid claims to pursue and of the ones made above its likely only refusing to comply with a
Valid DMCA would likely to be of any real legal value if that was in fact the case, something thats being disputed even before the ink had dried on their suit.
Watch this space for more information on twists and turns as this one will surely draw a big crowd of folks, many who had left filesharing long ago and who had decided it was a superior system to bit torrent for leeching files, any successful shutdown of newsgroups will see quite a few of them step back a little to the more mature and reliable systems I,m sure.
