News

Less than a week after launching major copyright-infringement litigation against several large Internet service providers (ISPs), member companies of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) abruptly withdrew their lawsuit because an offending offshore music site had even more abruptly gone dark.

In a precedent-setting legal maneuver, major record labels filed suit in US District Court in New York in mid-August against AT&T Broadband Corporation, Cable & Wireless USA, Sprint Corporation, Advanced Network Services, and UUNET Technologies, in the hope of securing an injunction that would have required the ISPs to prevent access to Listen4ever.com, a website reportedly based in China that offered thousands of free music files, including recordings that had yet to be released commercially. On Wednesday, August 21, the record labels—including Sony Music Entertainment, Inc., Virgin Records America, Inc., Warner Bros. Records, Inc., Arista Records, and many others—dropped the suit because Listen4ever.com had gone offline.

The site's disappearance may have been almost instantaneous; when news of the lawsuit broke, our attempts to access the site yielded nothing but a "page under construction" placeholder. Representatives of the RIAA said they would consider reviving the lawsuit if the site reappears under another name. If nothing else, the action, and reaction, proved that Internet time and legal time operate on vastly different scales.

The thrust of the lawsuit was to get the ISPs to function as what the Associated Press called "copyright police" by controlling what their subscribers could and could not do online. If that suit—or a similar one—proved successful, it could open the floodgates for suits launched by every imaginable special interest group that wished to control what can take place on the Internet. A flurry of such suits would inevitably challenge the privacy rights of individuals—what remains worrisome to champions of those rights is the uncertainty of the judicial branch's response to such a conflict.

In that ominous vein, the RIAA is pursuing a suit against Verizon Communications in US District Court in Washington, DC, in the hope of getting the telecom giant to reveal the identity of an ISP subscriber with a computer that the RIAA calls "a hub for significant music piracy." Verizon has questioned the validity of a subpoena issued July 24 demanding the name of the subscriber, claiming that the offending music files are on a private computer, not on the Verizon network. "We recognize clearly that holders of intellectual property have a right to copyright protection," said Verizon spokesman Eric Rabe. "At the same time, we think the privacy rights of our subscribers are important, too, and need to be protected."