p2pnet.net News:- The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) is creating a legal wave from the AllofMP3.com decision and riding it all the way to iRights.info [German]. A wave, since it’s sending out warning notices to sites for linking to AllofMP3; all the way, because iRights is an informative website providing critical, but independent, background on digital copyright issues.

The German IFPI had already sent a notice to online magazine Heise demanding a link to AllofMP3 to be removed from one of its articles.

The IFPI bases its demands on the court decision that prohibited the making available of unlicensed music files within Germany by the Russian AllofMP3. In the notice to Heise, similar to that sent to iRights, the IFPI claims:

"By establishing a hyperlink to the Internet page in question you are enabling the acquisition of copyright protected sound recordings of our clients via the illegal download offer. By illegally providing public access you are thereby objectively supporting the illegal dissemination of copyright protected sound recordings [...] or even aiding and abetting such activity."

The IFPI also referred to an earlier case involving Heise, in which the linking to a site that provided circumvention software in a news article was deemed illegal.

That ruling was appealed by Heise and will probably be decided later this month.

In the meantime, iRights notes that not only had it taken down the link to AllofMP3 before the IFPI sent out its notice, but that the AllofMP3 decision can not yet be legally enforced because it hasn’t yet been served to the operator of AllofMP3.

The IFPI’s tactics are understandable from an enforcement perspective. But it’s questionable whether the operator of AllofMP3 will stop making downloads available within Germany, let alone if he’s even able to do so at all.

So, while the decision establishes the illegality of AllofMP3’s practice under German copyright law, and provides a prohibition thereof, more importantly is its (intended) side-effect: a derived enforcement tool against portals within the German jurisdiction.

Overall, the effectiveness of this tool may be doubted, and using it against information/news sites may harm its "public relations" value.

But how will far private organizatins such as the IFPI be allowed to go to (effectively) enforce copyrights?

The prohibition of linking is one thing, but there are other, and possibly more effective (technological) measures, such as DNS poisoning.

These measures represent different levels of regulation in the internet chain, and raise different legal questions.

One can only hope that courts and regulators provide answers that look beyond the direct impact of copyright infringement, and consider the long term influence on the internet infrastructure.

Rik Lambers – CoCo
[Lambers is a former researcher at the Institute for Information Law, Amsterdam, who's now in transition to a new full time job in the field of IP/Internet law. He's also an associate member of the European INDICARE project, which researches consumer issues related to DRM.]

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