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"We cannot sit idly by while these services continue to operate illegally, especially at a time when new legitimate services are being launched."
——the RIAA's Hilary Rosen

RECORDING INDUSTRY, MPAA SUE NAPSTER’S CHILDREN

Second-Generation Swapperies Music City, Kazaa, Grokster Targeted in New Suit
On Tuesday, the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America filed a suit against the "21st century piratical bazaar" operated by second-wave swapperies Music City, Kazaa and Grokster. The suit, filed in a federal court in Los Angeles, marks the fourth major legal action the copyright holders have filed in their attempt to curb online file swapping. The RIAA is 3-0 coming into this legal contest, having shut down Scour, humbled Napster and financially hobbled Aimster.

What will make this suit different from the previous three is that none of the swapperies being sued use a convenient-to-shut-down central server, as was the case with Napster.

This, of course, is no deterrent to the Barry Bonds of the copyright defense world, RIAA chief Hilary Rosen. "We cannot sit idly by while these services continue to operate illegally," Rosen said in a statement. "Especially at a time when new legitimate services are being launched."

Both MusicNet (the RealNetworks, EMI, Bertelsmann, AOLTW joint venture) and Pressplay (the Sony, Vivendi Universal joint venture—now fortified with EMI content!) are scheduled to launch before the end of the year.

While each company gives its own brand to the service, the software underlying each is virtually identical. Music City’s Morpheus, the Kazaa Media Desktop, Grokster and others have kept file swapping alive and well in the post-Napster world. Webnoize estimated that 3.05 billion files were downloaded using the FastTrack-based network, Audio Galaxy, iMesh and the Gnutella network during August—compared with a similar estimate of 2.79 billion files downloaded through Napster at its peak in February 2001.The source of the software for all three services is a company alternately called FastTrack, or Consumer Empowerment, based in Amsterdam.

The FastTrack-based network, like the open-source Gnutella technology, allows searches to ripple through individual computers in the network without ever going through a centralized company server, making it all the harder to stop.

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