In the midst of the file-trading craze caused by Napster, the recording industry has been forced to turn its attention back to shutting down MP3 FTP sites, in part because of an automated aggregation website.
On Friday, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed a suit against content-aggregation site MP3Board.com. The copyright infringement suit filed in federal district court in New York claims that the website knowingly gathers, indexes, and organizes links to sites where illegal files are offered for download.
"While the Internet and MP3 technology provide budding artists without recording contracts with an inexpensive vehicle for communicating their work to the public, the predominant use of MP3 technology is the trafficking of pirated sound recordings," said a statement in the written court documents filed by the RIAA.
By using three automated search engines, MP3Board.com is able to aggregate hyperlinks to thousands of websites that offer music files for download. Before posting the link, they are checked automatically to make sure the site is live.
"If this kind of automated hyperlinking is ruled illegal, the Internet is going to grind to a halt," said Ira Rothken, legal counsel for MP3Board.com.
An RIAA representative said this case isn't about hyperlinking at all.
"This isn't about automated versus not-automated hyperlinks, this is about what they know and what they don't know," said Steve Fabrizio, the RIAA's senior vice president for legal and business affairs.
"This isn't the RIAA coming out against hyperlinking. This is about the fact that the sources MP3Board.com are linking to are blatantly pirate sites which they are aware of. They link to sites that say 'Super Pirated MP3s.' They even have a genre labeled as 'Legal MP3s.'"
Because MP3board.com had filed an earlier suit against the RIAA in San Jose, Rothken said that the recording industry was engaging in delaying tactics by filing their suit in New York.
MP3Board's pre-emptive lawsuit was filed on June 2 in federal district court in San Jose, California. The company's suit is asking a federal judge not only to end the RIAA's attempts to shut its service down, but also to rule on whether providing hyperlinks constitutes copyright infringement.
Rothken now expects a lengthy series of motions to be filed that will run up the legal bills of his client.
"We think they had a responsibility and a duty in the exact same court that they were sued and them filing 3,000 miles away is obviously procedural gamesmanship," Rothken said. "We filed out here because we had to file out here. My clients office is in Santa Cruz, all the servers are in San Jose, and a large number of the RIAA members are located out here. They are trying to make us spend a lot of money and delay the case."
More nonsense, said Fabrizio.
"Filing that lawsuit was a tactical move on their part," Fabrizio said. "That suit, besides from its frivolous nature, is filed against the wrong people. MP3Board would have to file against each of the recording companies and not the RIAA for this not to get thrown out of court. And since we haven't even been served with their suit yet, I can only assume that our suit was filed with the intention of prosecuting this, and theirs (was filed) with the intention of getting a press release."
The original suit is requesting that the judge clarify the requirements of how MP3Board should monitor its site for illegal content, grant an injunction to block the RIAA's attempts to shut down the company, and award the company monetary damages for the recording industry's interference in its business.
"We filed the lawsuit asking the court to declare that hyperlinking out of a search engine isn't a copyright infringement," the Rothken. "Just because there are a percentage of illegal files doesn't mean that my client should be held accountable for pirating music files."
This is the latest round of legal infighting between the two organizations which started last October.
The RIAA sent a series of cease-and-desist letters to the ISPs that were hosting MP3board, causing the website to have its access terminated on two separate occasions. When the company continued to renew its access with other service providers, the RIAA delivered two more letters directly to MP3Board demanding that the company cease its operations by June 2, 2000, or face legal action.
