farbot.com

For years now I've had people rolling their eyes at me not only because I refuse to copy music or other copyrighted works for them on a casual basis, but also because I refuse to ask someone else for a copy of something. I know better, and now with the RIAA's legal club swinging more and more widely, the RIAA is proving me right. Illegally copying music isn't just wrong, it can get you in deep trouble.

This week the RIAA has launched a lawsuit against Usenet.com, a commercial service provider that offers high-speed access to the publicly available and rather ancient Usenet news group system. This lawsuit could very well be the last in the RIAA's campaign against file sharing systems since Usenet groups have been used that way long before the rise of the web as we know it. Given Usenet.com's no doubt very small user base compared to P2P systems the RIAA has taken down already -- Usenet.com charges money you know, something music pirates don't like to give up -- this may be the ratcheting up in intensity of their campaign targeting smaller fish.

In case you're not really getting what I'm saying, if you've been copying music illegally, you're one of the small fish.

The Usenet news groups are a collection of text-only discussion groups that are often used to move binary files around by encoding them as blocks of text. News readers have long had the ability to decode and reassemble files from dozens or hundreds of news group postings, effectively enabling file sharing on a somewhat slow but broad scale.

Usenet.com, as a commercial venture, promotes a secure service that encrypts your activities from their news server to you, preventing your ISP from eavesdropping on what you're doing or saying. Call it freedom of speech or call it freedom to infringe copyrights, that's what they're selling on top of their basic service plans, and that's what might have attracted the RIAA's army of lawyers.

While it doesn't promote copyright violations the way I recall broadband providers' advertisements in my neck of the woods do -- showing happy teens using high-speed networks to download music and listen to it right away on their computers when no subscription music service or other legal method of getting that content is ever named in the advertisement -- Usenet is now a target of the RIAA's legal might. That means that prosecution of the open culture of Usenet can't be far behind.

ISPs have seen less of a need for newsgroup access with the rise of the web and have stopped offering it, or greatly filtered out groups that deal in binary content distribution. It's likely that the RIAA will get what they want by simply scaring remaining ISPs into dropping Usenet access entirely, and if they take out Usenet.com, that would end commercial support for the service and it will wither and be shut down.

Go ahead and tell me you can go to The Pirate Bay, but you can't tell me that it's survival is anything but an anomaly. All it will take is a little bit more political pressure and it will be taken down just as all of the other copyrighted content torrent hosting sites have been taken down. It is only a matter of time, and once they hand over the IP addresses to law enforcement, your power to "stick it to the man" will have turned into a power to sit helplessly and wonder every day when your mail is delivered if this will be the day you are sued for stealing things that don't belong to you.

Will anybody miss newsgroups? I doubt it. Will it significantly reduce file trading and copyright infringement? I doubt that, too.