[Infowarrior] - RIAA Threatening ICANN About .music; Claiming It Will Be Used To Infringe

[Richard Forno]

RIAA Threatening ICANN About .music; Claiming It Will Be Used To Infringe

from the when-you're-an-organization-of-lawyers... dept

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110119/02303312714/riaa-threatening-icann-about-music-claiming-it-will-be-used-to-infringe.shtml

Oh look, the RIAA is overreacting yet again -- and doing so the only way it knows how: by rolling out the legal threats. This time it's threatening ICANN over its new top level domain program, which allows all sorts of new TLDs to be registered -- including planned proposals for a .music domain. But the RIAA isn't happy about this, because:

We are concerned that a music themed gTLD will be used to enable wide scale copyright and trademark infringement.

I'm sort of at a loss how the specific TLD makes any difference whatsoever in enabling infringement. A website's a website, no matter what the TLD is. How will having a new TLD enable any more infringement at all? It seems like the real goal of this is (of course) to get ICANN to act as a copyright cop for any such TLD. Just as the RIAA has sought to make copyright cops out of ISPs, the government and other third parties, now it's seeking help from ICANN, who hopefully knows better. So it suggests that it would like to "work with ICANN... to ensure this type of malicious behavior does not occur." 

And, of course, in typical RIAA fashion, if ICANN says no, the RIAA plans to go legal:

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.

I'd love to see the RIAA try to "escalate the issue further." What's it going to do? Is any court really going to go so far as to say that just because something that has not yet been created, and might possibly in some weird stretch of the imagination be used for infringement, that ICANN has to block it?