‘No .music!’ – RIAA orders ICANN
p2pnet view RIAA:- ICANN is the latest organisation the Big 4′s RIAA, and adherents, is trying to bully into becoming an unpaid corporate copyright cop.
According to Victoria Sheckler, .music is the latest awful threat to the livelihood of her employers, Vivendi Universal (France), Sony (Japan), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music (US, but controlled by a Canadian).
Sheckler is ‘deputy general counsel’ to the Big 4′s RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and the main signatory to a missive making “vague legal threats over ICANN’s new top-level domains program”, states domainincite.com.
Issuing spurious threats is, of course, one of the few things the RIAA, run by Mitch ‘The Don’ Bainwol, is good at.
Ask the 40,000 or so Americans, including very young children, targeted in its failed six-year Sue ‘Em All music campaign, which did nothing more than to alert the internet at large about the opportunities offered by file sharing.
Now it’s “concerned that .music, for example”, might “encourage copyright infringement”, says domainincite.com.
The Big 4 legal extortion unit wants ICANN to “ensure best practices are developed” to prevent musical TLDs being used to enable music piracy’, says the article, quoting Sheckler’s letter as bleating >>>
We are concerned that a music themed gTLD will be used to enable wide scale copyright and trademark infringement.
And >>>
We would like to work with ICANN and others to ensure that best practices are developed and used to ensure this type of malicious behavior does not occur.
And >>>
We strongly urge you to take these concerns seriously … we prefer a practical solution to these issues, and hope to avoid the need to escalate the issue further.
“Please contact us if you have an comments or questions, or would like to meet to discuss the best practices to avoid malicious behavior”, Sheckler adds.
She has the traditional RIAA tone dead on — pretentious, over-bearing, patronising.
Meaningful content? Nada.
One of the RIAA’s objections to the current Applicant Guidebook for new TLDs is the “community objection” procedure, domainincite.com says.
Apparently, the RIAA “doesn’t think gives it a good enough chance of blocking a .music TLD application”, says the post, going on:
I wonder if the RIAA is planning its own .music bid.
There is already one very public .music initiative, championed for the last couple of years by Constantine Roussos, an active and vocal ICANN community member.
But the string is valuable, is likely to be contested, and there’s a not insignificant chance that Roussos will be beaten to it by an applicant with deeper pockets.
Regardless, the RIAA’s argument that .music equals piracy is pretty poor, possibly disingenuous, and unlikely to influence the Guidebook.
“ICANN constantly walks the tightrope between technical coordination and content regulation”, says the story, adding, “getting into the business of fighting piracy is not going to make it onto the agenda any time soon.”
Did she dream this up all by herself? Or was she helped by Bainwol and his main man, Cary ‘Tough Love’ Sherman, , one wonders
Stay tuned.
domainincite.com – RIAA threatens ICANN over new TLDs, January 18, 2011
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
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January 20th, 2011 at 3:31 pm
One has to wonder if she even knows what TLD means.
Who the hell cares if there is a .music domain?
How about we change RIAA to RIAA.IKnowJackShit with the new .IKnowJackShit domain, for the ignoramuses of the world to host their own sites, without any misunderstanding of the general public?
And what a great way to kill independent musicians who are thinking it would be so cool to have a band site that’s .music!
January 20th, 2011 at 4:06 pm
@ Robert:
Good one.
The RIAA has gone over the top. Again. But then, it’s always been major embarrasment to the States, even though the Big 4′s home countries — three of them, anwyay — are far removed.
Cheers!
January 20th, 2011 at 6:40 pm
They don’t want people to think of the internet as a place to get music. After all these years, they are still trying to cram the napster genie back into the bottle.
It’s kind of funny, and kind of sad…..
oh well
January 20th, 2011 at 6:59 pm
“We strongly urge you to take these concerns seriously … we prefer a practical solution to these issues, and hope to avoid the need to escalate the issue further.”
Practical, huh? You mean as practical as suing your customers into poverty because of a misunderstanding? As practical as shooting yourself in the foot and then hitting it with a sledgehammer? That kind of practicality I don’t need in my society.
January 20th, 2011 at 7:39 pm
“We strongly urge you to take these concerns seriously … we prefer a practical solution to these issues, and hope to avoid the need to escalate the issue further.”
Are they seriously throwing down a semi-veiled threat of lawsuits if ICANN doesn’t follow their “recommendations”? CHEEKY BI@TCH!
They just continue to amaze me with the total lack of any intelligent spark showing through in the way they talk to and treat people……..
my 13yo has more brains than these idiots!
January 22nd, 2011 at 4:22 pm
Sounds to me like the idiots think they own the word music. That’ll never float. This is bluff with enough money to make it a pain.
January 22nd, 2011 at 9:30 pm
If “.music” was any good as a domain suffix, surely TPB would have come out with “themusicbay.music”, right?