Usenet.com May Find Safe Harbor From RIAA lawsuit

Daneal writes "Ars Technica has some interesting analysis of the RIAA's lawsuit against Usenet.com. There's reason to believe that Usenet.com — and most other Usenet providers — could qualify for protection under the DMCA's Safe Harbor provision. 'The DMCA's Safe Harbor provision provides protection for ISPs from copyright infringement lawsuits as long as they take down offending material once they are served with a notice of infringement. "Whether the Safe Harbor applies is the central legal question that is going to be raised," EFF senior staff attorney Fred von Lohmann told Ars. An RIAA spokesperson tells Ars that the group has issued "many" takedown notices to Usenet.com, but von Lohmann says that the volume of takedown notices isn't what counts. "The DMCA's Safe Harbor makes it very clear," von Lohmann said. "The number of notices doesn't matter as long as you take the infringing content down."'"

USENET?

[idontgno]

They wanna take down USENET?

And they're gonna target a single NNTP provider to do it?

OMFG, USENET was P2P before P2P was invented. It's so distributed, diffuse, and attributionless that it's practically untouchable.

Who keeps picking out windmills for RIAA to tilt at? Their legal attack strategist needs to put down the crack pipe and step away from his desk.

Seriously...

Common Carrier Defense ...

[xmas2003]

Since Usenet just publishes other people's stuff, don't they (at least somewhat) qualify for common carrier classification (similar to phone companies) in that the the content is someone else's?

Along these lines, what about Google/other search engines that show "copyrighted" content - either in the snippet or in their cache?

Re:Seem to remember...

[guruevi]

That's RIAA FUD. From experience in a webhosting company, RIAA will just send you a notice that there was illegal music found and just give a listing of ALL similar content (like: delete all MP3's although only one is actually infringing) on the site even though it might not be infringing (copyright law DOES have exceptions) or the site might have been hacked before.

They probably refuse to take down content that is legally protected or that is legally not a full work and even if they take it down, within a few minutes another version might be up again so it sounds like the RIAA is going to have to send a lot of notices to take every single Usenet post down.

if usenet.com takes down stuff

[gslavik]

So, if I post something using another provider that a music label asks usenet.com to takedown and usenet.com does it, won't people leave them because they are taking down stuff that I post and move to another nntp provider? But won't usenet.com go out of business because they will lose customers?

So the **AA's plan is

[zappepcs]

to force ISP's to filter the entire fscking Internet, one service at a time?
This is going to be interesting. If Usenet.com goes down, next will be NNTP service filters on every ISP in the US, and then by association, such efforts will be made in the rest of the world. Perhaps it might not work in Russia for fear of being mistaken for a spammer, but in the rest of the world, the US government and the **AA will push to have the entire Internet filtered...

The next step? To filter all your email, IM, and VoIP traffic as well, and in fact any method of sharing data. Sounds like tin foil hat stuff, but that seems to be the writing on the wall. If the **AA has those filters in place, guess who will be using them? Why the NSA of course. Any bets on whether the **AA are digging so deep into their wallets on the legal battles because the NSA is promising to refund some portion of the cost, if they are not already secretly funding them from money that went missing in Iraq?

yeah, sounds a bit crazy, but after the lies that have been discovered lately, it would NOT surprise me.

So how does this work for ....

[3seas]

...someone who put their own stuff on usenet and then someone comes along and falsely claims copyright infringment to the ISP and teh ISP takes it down.

Does the genuine originator ever get notified and given an opportunity to counter?

"They don't host it!"

[Aladrin]

I see a lot of people saying "They don't host the files!"

This is absolutely wrong. They may not be the initial point that the file enters the network, but they DO host the files on their own servers there -entire- time that it's available to their customers. Every usenet provider does this. It's how the entire system works.

Each provider can choose which groups they will bother to handle (it used to be common for free services not to handle the 'alt.' newsgroups) and they -can- remove anything from that server that they choose. It wouldn't be fun to find exactly what the RIAA has requested a takedown for without specific post IDs, but it can be done.

Places that don't host the files are merely indexing services (like newzbin.com) and truly do not host the files. It's just a list of the post IDs that you need to grab what you are looking for from usenet.

I've never heard of a usenet provider that has removed partial content... Only entire groups, and never (that I've heard of) because someone asked them to.

So while it is theoretically possible for this law to protect them, they've never complied with it and it won't do them a bit of good.

It won't do the RIAA any good, either, though... Hundreds or thousands of servers all over the world mirror the same information from 3 to 200 days... They would have to individually ask for the files to be removed from each of them individually.

(Before anyone objects, I know they aren't stored as 'files', but that's irrelevant to the conversation.)

Re:USENET?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some ISPs don't provide newsgroup access anymore, make it a pain to get or have limits on uploading or downloading binaries. RIAA pressure could make this the norm.

Services like Usenet.com and Giganews are quite possibly vulnerable, as we see from this lawsuit. Maybe they'll try to go for customer logs next?

It may not be possible to take down Usenet, but it is quite possible to make it a little more difficult or risky than it is now for the average college student to access binaries.

Although I think the real point of this is to instill paranoia. RIAA lawsuits are a more than anything else a scare tactic and an effective PR campaign designed to instill fear in casual downloaders. That may be why they're going after Usenet.com instead of Giganews or similar sites, to instill some confusion and so that the aforementioned college student thinks he's at risk of a lawsuit himself if he downloads from Usenet (no matter what provider he uses.) My theory at least, take it with a grain of salt.

Re:Seem to remember...

[Anonymous Coward]

Arent binaries in most usenet groups removed automatically after a certain number of days whether or not a takedown has been issued? This is usually determined by the volume of messages and storage of the particular provider. So , is there a time limit on how fast you MUST remove stuff once a takedown has been issued?
I ask , because the way usenet works , stuff doesnt stay on the server forever.

Re:Seem to remember...

[RulerOf]

I hit up Usenet.com a couple of days after the lawsuit notice was filed, the site wasn't specific on their retention rates, only offering the bullshit figure of "1 to 3 months of binary retention." Having experience with usenet, I would never purchase service from a provider with such vague figures on exactly what they offer. That said, the parent might have a point that if there's a grace period during which content must be removed, and happens to be longer than their retention rates, the labels' lobbyists might want to start working on getting that changed.