RIAA: No Hyperlinking Allowed

In the midst of the file-trading craze caused by Napster, the recording industry has been forced to turn its attention back to shutting down MP3 FTP sites, in part because of an automated aggregation website.

On Friday, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed a suit against content-aggregation site MP3Board.com. The copyright infringement suit filed in federal district court in New York claims that the website knowingly gathers, indexes, and organizes links to sites where illegal files are offered for download.

"While the Internet and MP3 technology provide budding artists without recording contracts with an inexpensive vehicle for communicating their work to the public, the predominant use of MP3 technology is the trafficking of pirated sound recordings," said a statement in the written court documents filed by the RIAA.

By using three automated search engines, MP3Board.com is able to aggregate hyperlinks to thousands of websites that offer music files for download. Before posting the link, they are checked automatically to make sure the site is live.

"If this kind of automated hyperlinking is ruled illegal, the Internet is going to grind to a halt," said Ira Rothken, legal counsel for MP3Board.com.

An RIAA representative said this case isn't about hyperlinking at all.

"This isn't about automated versus not-automated hyperlinks, this is about what they know and what they don't know," said Steve Fabrizio, the RIAA's senior vice president for legal and business affairs.

"This isn't the RIAA coming out against hyperlinking. This is about the fact that the sources MP3Board.com are linking to are blatantly pirate sites which they are aware of. They link to sites that say 'Super Pirated MP3s.' They even have a genre labeled as 'Legal MP3s.'"

Because MP3board.com had filed an earlier suit against the RIAA in San Jose, Rothken said that the recording industry was engaging in delaying tactics by filing their suit in New York.

MP3Board's pre-emptive lawsuit was filed on June 2 in federal district court in San Jose, California. The company's suit is 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.