RIAA Goes After Cloud Computing, Box.Net
Fresh off the a $105 million LimeWire victory, the RIAA has filed a legal action against Box.Net, a service that to let its users share, manage and access content in the cloud. Box.NET investor Mark Cuban has called it "The Facebook Of Cloud Computing". According to some sources, Box.NET may have been used to spread content prior to release date, and the RIAA is primarily interested in those select users.
A spokesperson for the label backed trade group told the Hollywood Reporter, that has not filed lawsuit yet, but rather a subpoena as part of a pre-release investigation saying that it's "too soon to tell what we might do with the information once it is uncovered."
With the explosion of cloud computing services, each with their own rules and protections, the RIAA action is certain to raise eyebrows. For their part, Box,NET quickly responded that it will comply if the courts requires it.
"We take the confidentiality of our customers' information very seriously, but just like all other businesses, we are legally required to comply with court orders," said Box.Net in a statement to THR. "Our compliance will be limited to the information the court requires we produce. At Box, we're primarily focused on powering collaboration and information sharing within businesses, and it's rare that we run into copyright infringement issues in those instances."
This is pretty outrageous. The DMCA has a clearly defined process in place. If pirated materials are being made public on box.net, then all RIAA needs to do is file a takedown request with a link to the material or other uniquely identifying information.
What’s really outrageous here is that it appears that the RIAA is expecting Box to scan their users’ files looking for hashes of infringing materials. IOW, they seem to be requiring Box to violate contracts with their users and deeply undermine their business model – one which does not per-se thrive on infringing activities.
One has to assume this is in response to Amazon and Google… ie – “make sure you limit access to your users’ files to just individual users… or else”.