Anonymous Attacks Broadcast Music Incorporated

Anonymous hacktivist group has revived Operation Payback by launching distributed denial-of-service attacks against bmi.com, the website of Broadcast Music Incorporated.

Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI) is a US organization which collects music license fees and represents the interests of songwriters, composers and publishers.

The attacks started earlier this week and the organization announced that it has taken its website offline willingly.

"In a protective measure, BMI.com has been temporarily taken down due to a denial-of-service attack reportedly launched by a hacker group. The attack slows down external access to BMI.com," BMI said.

"We believe that this attack is part of their misguided campaign to attack creative rights," the organization added and noted that its other operations were not impacted.

In a manifesto posted online in Anonymous-style, the group announced the resurrection of Operation Payback, its several-month-long DDoS campaign that targeted anti-piracy organizations last year.

The harsh copyright laws that media organizations lobby for worldwide are at the center of Anonymous' agenda as the group feels they have a negative impact on creativity and freedom of information.

In an open letter to BMI, Anonymous writes that: "Too long have the music and cinema industries, among others, abused copyright for their own gain. Legislation serves to protect artists not the companies managing them and should never attempt to prevent the spread of creativity to the general public.

"This is a message to you and other corporations like you, we cannot stand this abuse anymore. No company can take advantage of our liberties to churn profits and censor information in any form, this is unacceptable and will be dealt with accordingly by US."

The BMI website remains down at the time of writing this article and if past experience is any indication additional targets will soon be selected, especially since the group has done pretty much all it can to assist anti-government movements in the Arab world and the WikiLeaks issue also cooled down.