RIAA Discovers The Wild World Of Usenet(.com)
The latest RIAA lawsuit target: Usenet.com, a North Dakota-based company that allows users paid access to Usenet newsgroup feeds and touts a privacy package called Secure-Tunnel, which allows people to surf newsgroups anonymously (for an extra fee, of course). Since Usenet by nature is a decentralized network, I’m guessing that the RIAA suits must have decided to target the site that actually had the forethought to brand itself as Usenet.com first, as a sort of warning shot. And I’m also going to posit that RIAA spokeswoman Cara Duckworth hasn’t figured out all the other newsgroups out there that people might be interested in surfing anonymously:
“Usenet.com has promoted and advanced an illegal business model on the backs of the music community,” Duckworth said in a statement. “It may be theft in a slightly different online form, but the illicit business model of usenet.com is little different than the Groksters of the world…. This business should not be allowed to remain a brazen outlaw that actively shirks its legal obligations.”
Now, if the RIAA had teamed up with, say, Vivid Video for its copyright suit, I might be rolling my eyes a little less at this allegation; surely the pornography peddlers of the world are losing boatloads more money than the music industry, especially given that Usenet is such an arcane platform. How Sendspace et al have escaped litigation threats up to this point is beyond me, although I’m guessing it’s just a sign of the RIAA’s chronic behind-the-timesism. Which clearly means that there’s only one target that the majors can try to take out next: Gopher.
