RIAA to Get Sued

MP3Board.com Inc., an online start-up that
indexes, searches and links music-related material on the Internet,
today sued the Recording Industry Association of America
(RIAA), for the role the association allegedly played in temporarily
shutting down MP3Board.com.

MP3Board.com Inc., which is not associated with MP3.com Inc., had
already filed an earlier lawsuit against the RIAA in an US Federal
District
Court in California's Silicon Valley seeking damages against the RIAA for
harassment. The RIAA is a trade association representing the vast
majority of major US record labels.

When asked why, since the initial June 2 MP3Board complaint is pending,
his client was filing a counterclaim, MP3board attorney Ira Rothken
said that though his client sued the RIAA in California, the RIAA
"turned right around and filed a civil lawsuit against MP3Board.com
3,000 miles away, in New York."

Rothken said the counterclaim, which MP3Board filed in the New
York case, is essentially the same as the complaint it filed earlier
in California. In the California case, MP3Board claims the
RIAA harassed the company by intimidating its Web-hosting
partner into terminating services to the site. That caused
MP3Board.com to be offline for five days while a new
host was found, the lawyer said.

Rothken said his client is seeking damages from the RIAA for the
five days that the MP3Board.com Web site was inoperative. MP3Board
also is seeking a judgment that mere hyperlinks to other
publicly accessible Web sites and files created by automated
processes do not constitute copyright infringement, even if the
destination of a hyperlink is a Web site, page or file containing
infringing or pirated content.

Rothken also said that, along with the counterclaim, he filed a motion
to have the New York action either dismissed or the venue of that
case transferred to California to be combined with the initial lawsuit.
This motion is set for hearing on Sept. 1, Rothken said.

Rothken said his client currently is in the process of
developing a new digital rights technology that will assist copyright
owners in automating the link searching and removal process, while
reducing the burden on automated indexing systems like MP3Board.com.

The RIAA did not return Newsbytes' call for comment.

Reported by newsbytes.com, http://www.newsbytes.com