The Bush administration is supporting the Recording Industry Association of America in its effort to force Verizon to disclose the identities of people who are illegally trading digital music files over the Web.
The US Justice Department filed a brief in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia supporting an injunction the RIAA had made to force Verizon to identify a subscriber who had allegedly made more than 600 copyrighted music files available over the Internet without authorization.
Verizon had argued that the injunction violated the First Amendment because it does not provide “protection of the expressive and associational interests of Internet users.”
The RIAA sought the injunction under the controversial 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows companies to circumvent the normal judicial process in pursuing violators.
“The government’s filing today supports the proposition that we have long advocated — copyright owners have a clear and umambiguous entitlement to determine who is infringing their copyrights online, and that entitlement is constitutional. Verizon’s persistent efforts to protect copyright thieves on pirate peer-to-peer networks will not succeed,” said Matt Oppenheim, senior vice president of business and legal affairs at the RIAA.
(via The Associated Press)
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