RIAA drops the case against backbone ISPs

RIAA has dropped its lawsuit against major backbone ISPs, stating that the site they wanted to block, Listen4ever.com, has been shut down. Site has been unavailable -- at least from western countries -- since Sunday.

RIAA's legal pressure against major backbone ISPs caused a huge media attention earlier this week, because of its possible effects to the Internet as a whole -- censorship and forcing ISPs to block specific sites, like in this case, could lead in a situation where various countries start asking backbone providers to block content that is not "acceptable" in specific country, etc., ultimately limiting Net's freedom dramatically.

Anyway, RIAA still has plans to sue the individuals who operated the site in Peoples Republic of China, through its international sister organization, IFPI.

Written by: Petteri Pyyny @ 22 Aug 2002 13:12

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3 comments

seanbyrne

Think of the Internet as a Railroad, a train station as a Website and the ISP as the Train company.

If an ISP can get sued for allowing its customers to access a site with pirated Music, etc., then it's like sueing a Train Company for allowing its customers to take its train to a train station that is located near Pirate CD stalls.

I don't see what the ISPs are doing wrong as it's the website provider, i.e. listen4ever.com that is at fault here.

23.8.2002 12:16 #1

mychucky

So is the site blocked for us in the United States or is it shut down.

Is there a master list of blocked sites and who maintains it.

How do I know if I am trying to access a blocked site.

26.8.2002 06:27 #2

seanbyrne

The site is actually down. I'm using the Indigo ISP (Ireland) and the web browser gives 'DNS Error/page not found'. I tried pinging it and got the following:

Pinging listen4ever.com [61.166.69.54] with 32 bytes of data:

Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 61.166.69.54:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),

26.8.2002 09:49 #3

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