14 DAY TRIAL // The website of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been offline over the weekend and continues to be so, because of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks launched by Anonymous in retaliation to the LimeWire shutdown.
Last week, a federal court issued a permanent injunction prohibiting Lime Wire LLC, from distributing, selling, advertising or supporting its popular Limewire peer-to-peer file sharing application.
Created in 2000, LimeWire predates the BitTorrent protocol and is an important part of the Internet file sharing history, together with programs like Napster or KaZaA.
Anonymous, a group of Internet hacktivists, which fights against copyright legislation and anti-piracy organizations has taken issue with the court order, which was the result of a complaint filed by RIAA.
The group launched a coordinated DDoS attack against riaa.org on Friday at 5:00 PM EST and the website has been offline ever since.
"Good and Evil, Hope and Dispair [.sic], Yin and Yang, they are all counterparts. We are the counterpart of the entertainment industries.
"Without 'them', there is no 'us', and without 'us', there is no 'them'. If they act, we react. The RIAA managed to cut off another head of our Hydra (LimeWire), we reacted with our LOICs [DDoS tool]," Anonymous wrote on its Operation Payback website.
Operation Payback is the group's ongoing DDoS campaign against the entertainment industry, as well as other anti-piracy organizations, that started over one month ago.
This is actually the second time when RIAA becomes a target as part of Operation Payback, which so far also affected the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the Dutch Bescherming Rechten Entertainment Industrie Nederland (BREIN), the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT), the Spanish General Society of Authors and Editors (SGAE), the Federation of the Italian Music Industry (FIMI) and many others.