Tactics Toughen on Music Piracy

As online pirates move offshore, the music industry is adopting aggressive strategies that include suing the Internet backbone providers to block Web sites that offer illegal downloads and demanding the names of customers from service providers.

In the latest such maneuver, the Recording Industry Assn. of America sought a federal court order Tuesday compelling Verizon Communications Inc. to reveal the name of a customer allegedly trading hundreds of pirated songs. And in a lawsuit filed Friday, the RIAA asked for an injunction requiring four Internet backbone providers--AT&T; Broadband, Sprint Corp., WorldCom Inc. subsidiary UUNet Technologies Inc. and Cable & Wireless--to cut off access to Listen4Ever.com, a site hosted in China that offers illicit downloads of entire albums, some of which have yet to be released in stores.

The actions are unprecedented for the music industry, which has labored with little success to stamp out piracy and now is employing increasingly tough tactics.

“They’ve never gone after a backbone provider before,” said Matt Jackson, assistant professor of telecommunications at Pennsylvania State University. “If backbones shut down access, it’s like shutting down major roads into the United States.”

By taking aim at the backbone providers, the music industry is trying to force them to take a greater role in policing the data that moves across their networks. And by targeting individuals suspected of uploading copyrighted songs rather than just shutting down host sites, the industry is trying to show pirates that they can be tracked.

The music industry has typically worked with Internet service providers to take down offending sites without resorting to the court system. But because Listen4Ever.com is hosted in China, the site cannot be shut down from the U.S. Some pirate sites have set up in other countries to avoid the reach of U.S. copyright law. Sources said the RIAA tried to solicit the help of Chinese officials but was unsuccessful.

So the industry is trying to enlist backbone providers, which own the data freeways over which much of the Internet’s traffic flows, to block access to a site, something it has never done before. Most of North America’s Internet traffic eventually flows through UUNet, AT&T;, Sprint or Cable & Wireless, owners of the country’s four largest backbones, said David Farber, professor of telecommunications at the University of Pennsylvania. Any traffic intended for a blocked site that hit these backbones could easily and instantly be diverted.

That worries some scholars. “The concern is that the people who run these sites may never get their day in court,” said Mark Lemley, professor of intellectual property law at UC Berkeley.

Both the Verizon case and the RIAA’s suit against the backbone providers are based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a 1998 law that updated copyright rules for the electronic age. Critics complain that the law grants copyright holders too much power.

The RIAA’s lawyer, Matthew Oppenheim, said suing the companies that run the Internet backbone is a drastic step.

“It’s a rare situation when we can’t deal with the problem more directly,” he said. “We view this as a last-ditch effort.”

The effort may not get its day in court. Listen4Ever.com’s site went down over the weekend, but not through any actions by the backbone providers.

“If the site remains down, we will dismiss our case in the next few days,” Oppenheim said.

That would please backbone providers, none of whom would comment. But industry executives who declined to be identified said they were not eager to jump into the role of policing the Internet and regulating content.

“This opens up a huge can of worms for them,” said Gartner Inc. analyst P.J. McNealy. “They are merely the middleman here, and they’re looking for legal protection.”

Verizon gave a glimpse of the potential struggle ahead when it refused to comply with a July 24 subpoena requesting the identity of a customer allegedly trafficking pirated songs. The RIAA filed a motion Tuesday asking a federal judge to enforce the subpoena.

“We think the subpoena is not valid since [the songs] are not stored on our network,” said Eric Rabe, a Verizon spokesman. “While we think copyright owners have a right to their property, we also think customers have privacy rights that should also be maintained.”