News

The music industry's anti-piracy war took a new turn August 16, when a coalition of major record labels filed suit against several large Internet service providers in the hope of blocking access to an offshore free music site.

The copyright infringement suit filed in Manhattan federal court seeks an injunction that would require defendants AT&T Broadband Corporation, Cable & Wireless USA, Sprint Corporation, Advanced Network Services, and UUNET Technologies to prevent their subscribers from logging onto Listen4ever.com, a site based in mainland China that purportedly runs servers with "thousands" of music files. Plaintiffs include Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, RCA Records (a unit of Bertelsmann AG, parent of BMG) and Warner Brothers Records. Warner Brothers is a unit of AOL Time Warner, which also owns America Online, the world's largest ISP. Apparently, AOL is not a defendant in the suit.

Plaintiffs hope to block access to the site, which they claim allows users to unlawfully copy musical recordings. "The suit alleges that Listen4ever uses offshore servers located in the People's Republic of China to host the website through which the illegal copying occurs," reported Gail Appleson of Reuters news service. "The plaintiffs allege that Listen4ever provides its services to Internet users in the United States through backbone routers owned and operated by the defendants . . . This allows them (ISP users) to make unlawful copies of as many recordings as they choose," Appleson writes. Among the purportedly pirated titles was the album Dance for Me by Mary J. Blige, which was available on the site before its official release day of August 13.

Plaintiffs in the case have been unable to discover who owns or operates the site, but they have discovered that the domain name is registered to an individual in Tianjin, China. A site with the URL "www.Listen4ever.com" is accessible using Internet Explorer and AOL, but in both cases a "page under construction" display appears, with most of the text in Chinese. Appleson claims that the site disputed by plaintiffs in the piracy case is "written entirely in English" and "appears to target an American audience." How users obtain illicit music from the site isn't clear from our brief probe.

The music industry has launched several successful legal attacks against US-based free music sites, the most notable of which permanently neutralized Napster, the granddaddy of them all. Many free music sites are based outside the US, and are therefore beyond the reach of American law. Secondary attacks against ISPs may work, but the defendants in the ISP case may prevail by arguing that they are not responsible for what their subscribers do online. There is legal precedent for this, such as rulings that phone companies are not complicit in criminal negotiations that take place over their lines. The anti-piracy war is one that will continue for a long time. Several large record labels have formed "anti-piracy" divisions this year, with separate budgets and executive vice presidents whose sole job is to pursue piracy wherever it occurs, or wherever they imagine it occurs.