Pirated Music on Usenet?

RIAA (the Recording Industry Association of America) filed a new lawsuit against Usenet, accusing it for "enabling and encouraging its customers to reproduce and distribute millions of infringing copies of Plaintiff's valuable copyrighted sound recordings," as Wired noted on its page. RIAA was pretty active these days as it managed to sue no less than 20,000 persons, all of them being accused for distributing or encouraging others to distribute pirated music. Moreover, it also won a suit last week when Jammie Thomas was found guilty and ordered to pay a $220,000 fine to the copyright holders of the songs she distributed. The woman was accused by the organization for sharing and distributing unauthorized copies of the RIAA music on Kazaa, a popular file-sharing application.

Usenet's official didn't comment on the lawsuit, but RIAA seems prepared to fight against all the services and users who that are infringing their copyright.

"Usenet.com has promoted and advanced an illegal business model on the backs of the music community. It may be theft in a sligshtly different online form, but the illicit business model of usenet.com is little different than the Groksters of the world�. This business should not be allowed to remain a brazen outlaw that actively shirks its legal obligations", RIAA spokeswoman Cara Duckworth said for Wired.

The copyright infringement tends to become one of the main reasons for visiting the judge, since numerous companies which discover that their content has been copied without authorization file complaints against the publisher. Only a few consider it would be easier to contact the publisher in order to remove the content; most of them are quick to file lawsuits seeking for damages.

Just look at YouTube, Google's video sharing service. It was so affected by copyright infringement lawsuits that it was even forced to remove 100,000 clips from the page. And even if it agreed to do so, it was then sued and required to pay $1 billion in damages.