TechWag

The grand daddy protocol that dates back to pre-internet days is now under attack as a bastion of free wheeling copyright infringement, with Usenet.com taking the first salvo in the lawsuit machine that is RIAA. Usenet previously has been considered immune to copyright enforcement issues, but this really is no longer the case. At this point, anyone or any system that provides access to material that is covered under copyright at this point is going to become a target.

CNet reports that the key to this one is the language that Usenet.com used, which when we went through the web site is no longer there. Usenet according to CNet had stated:

There are some differences between Usenet.com and some of the other newsgroup providers that will help the RIAA. Usenet.com boasts that signing up for an account “gives you access to millions of MP3 files and also enables you to post your own files the same way and share them with the whole world.” Clearly they didn’t run that language by their lawyers first. Source: CNet

This falls clearly under inducement as established by the Grokster case. The fall out from this one is that Usenet is undergoing a semi-renaissance of use, because it is deemed to be safer than P2P, but as with all computer systems, logs are kept somewhere. Therefore, even if the company says that logs will not be kept, under the recent TorrentSpy issue where anything hitting RAM is considered a log, well you see how this one is going. Precedent has been set all over the place to make a compelling court case, one in which Usenet.com will probably loose.

This sets all the Usenet service providers in the danger zone if they do not start culling the alt.binaries hierarchy in the systems. That very hierarchy makes Usenet compelling to use to find material on the system, and the one big sales point when trying to get customers to sign up.

Given the precedents that have been set, the Usenet case will be interesting because just about everything is there. Copyright material, inducement, users doing what they want to do, log files, everything that RIAA has won to date is there in the process. That is what is going to make this a compelling case to any judge that hears it.

Tags: education, business //