MP3 site sues RIAA over linking

The recording industry got a bit of a shock when a digital music search site filed a lawsuit asking the judge to stop the Recording Industry Association of America from attempting to shut its website down.

Since last October, the RIAA has sent numerous cease-and-desist letters to MP3Board.com — a website that provides hyperlinks to MP3 music files available for download over the Internet — requesting that the site voluntarily shut down or face legal action. On May 25, RIAA sent a letter stating that legal action would be taken if the digital music company didn’t shut down its website by June 2.

MP3Board filed a preemptive lawsuit on June 2 in federal district court in San Jose, California, 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. “We’re mindful of the notion that there are infringing files out there, but there are non-infringing ones as well,” said Internet litigation lawyer Ira Rothken, who represents MP3Board. “The RIAA should go after the sites that are actually doing the infringing, not a site like ours. This is a pattern of abuse by the RIAA against my client.”

Rothken 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. “(Preventing sites from linking to illegal MP3 content) would mean every search engine would have to go through the RIAA’s database before they could do a search,” Rothken said. “That would paralyze the Internet,” he said. “So someone has to step in to say that linking services can’t be infringing on copyright just for hyperlinking.”

A ruling against linking could pose a problem for other MP3 search or browse sites like listen.com, gigabeat.com, myplay.com that aggregate downloadable music available on the Web. But listen.com managing editor Tim Quirk doesn’t think aggregation companies are in any danger. Unlike other music search sites, listen.com uses editors instead of automation to create its links. “I can’t imagine that unless you get an (old) fogy judge who doesn’t know what he’s doing,” he said. “Most of the music that we link to comes from our partners’ sites, so we’ve gone in and checked things out to make sure the music listed is legit,” Quirk said. “We also have an expert staff of editors who can tell when listed music is actually pirated, and we ignore all that stuff that is illegal for moral and business reasons.” The case most closely mirrors the Motion Picture Association of America’s request for an injunction to prevent hacker newsletter 2600 from posting links on its website to the DeCSS encryption utility. But this is also the latest in a series of legal salvos fired between the recording industry and the dotcom music world over copyright infringement.

MP3.com and file-trading application Napster have both squared off against the RIAA in court over creating and swapping MP3 files with largely unsuccessful results. Napster’s safe harbor defense was recently struck down by a federal judge, making the company’s defense against copyright infringement claims more difficult. The industry also won its suit against MP3.com’s controversial my.mp3.com service when a federal judge told the company to stop allowing consumers to stream music from an online database. Rothken said the odds of MP3.board settling its dispute with the RIAA are slim.