Petteri Pyyny
17 Aug 2002 5:51
The Recording Industry Association of America has finally gone crazy. At leant it sounds so. RIAA has sued several major backbone ISPs, including telecom giant AT&T, Cable&Wireless, Sprint, UUNet and Advanced Internet Services.
The suit seeks a court to rule that backbone providers (backbone providers are the networks who transfer virtually all the data between Internet locations, continents, etc -- despite what ISP you happen to use, your ISP rents the bandwidth from backbone providers anyway) have to block access from American users to website called Listen4ever.com which has servers located in People's Republic of China. The site offers illegal copies of latest chart hits in MP3 format.
Because RIAA's too long arm can't reach legally sites that are located in the PRC (the lawsuit says that the site operators are located in China as well), it now tries to block all the access to this site. But then this lawsuit raises scary questions -- if RIAA succeeds of blocking the site, other copyright owners are going to do the same. And there are helluva lots of things in the Net that are illegal in the U.S., but perfectly legal in other countries. So, if RIAA wins -- welcome censorship. We can only hope that ISPs are willing to fight the fight and not to bow to RIAA's request -- they have the financial power to fight back if they want to (unlike most of the other RIAA targets).
Source: Reuters