[Smoketoomuch]

Here is a cease and desist letter from CRIA (Canadian counterpart of RIAA) that was sent to OpenNap service. I post this because of the stylish reply that was sent back:

July 5, 2001 VIA E-MAIL:



WITHOUT PREJUDICE



WorldWithoutWire.com

253 King St. N

Waterloo, ON NJ2 2Y8



Dear Sir/Madam:



The Canadian Recording Industry Association ("CRIA") represents all of the major record companies and leading independent labels in Canada. In all, the CRIA members represent in excess of 90% of all sound recordings manufactured, distributed and sold in the Canadian market. CRIA is the national group of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry ("IFPI"), an International trade association representing the recording industry, with more than 1,400 independent and multinational record company members and 45 National groups.



CRIA is writing to inform you that a 'Napster-like' service providing peer-to-peer links and allowing the widespread transmission and reproduction of copyrighted music files is being hosted or otherwise made available on your Internet service at the IP address 209.162.224.73.



The Napster-like service hosted or otherwise made available on your Internet service indexes, allows searches of, and makes accessible many links to music files residing in the file libraries of users connected to this system. This promotes and assists large-scale Internet transmission and

copying of music files between users.



This system, which was investigated on 03/07/01 at 4:24:00 PM GMT, offers extensive directories of downloadable digitally encoded files containing copyrighted sound recordings. At the time of CRIA's investigation, approximately 252 users were, via this Napster-like service listed at the IP address above, making available on the Internet, uploading and downloading approximately 95262 files containing recorded music. According to our investigation, it appears that the vast majority of these sound recordings are owned by our member companies. This activity is not authorized by the copyright owners or their agents and is contrary to the law.



The system provided at the IP address listed above is almost identical to the system of Napster Inc. You may be aware that the United States Circuit Court for Ninth Circuit recently found that the Napster service knowingly encourages and assists widespread copyright infringement and, in doing so, directly affects the legitimate market for copyrighted works. The trial court has issued preliminary injunction against Napster. You may obtain a copy of the Ninth Circuit decision at http://www.riaa.com/pdf/napsterdecision.pdf.



On the basis of the Napster decision, Internet service providers in the US have voluntarily been blocking access to similar Napster-like services, upon receipt of a notice like this one from the US recording industry association. Blocking access to Napster-like services not only reduces the service provider's exposure to liability, but also helps them secure compliance with their own terms of service with their customers. Many service providers' terms of service specifically prohibit users from operating a server such as those required for Napster-like services, in order to avoid the bandwidth and speed problems that high-volume sites like these generate.



We therefore request that you immediately remove or block access to the infringing material offered via this server, which can be accomplished most effectively by blocking access to 209.162.224.73. We also ask that you inform the server operator that you have blocked access to his/her server by reason of the copyright infringement that it is facilitating, and confirm to CRIA that this activity has ceased.



You may contact me at CRIA Internet Anti-Piracy, 890 Yonge Street, Suite 1200, Toronto, Ontario, M4W 3P4, or e-mail antipiracy@cria.ca, to discuss any aspects of this notice or the service in question. We look forward to your response.





CRIA Internet Piracy Investigator

and now the reply that made me

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

Dear CRIA Internet Piracy Investigator:

Recently we received the attached form letter from your organization, as forwarded to us by our ISP, WorldWithoutWire.com. We understand that recently you connected to our OpenNap server at 209.162.224.73:8888, collected some statistics, and are now asking us to stop offering this service to the public.

We are sorry to hear that you found users publishing material copyrighted by your members through this service, but as OpenNap is simply an indexing/search facility for material hosted elsewhere (we don't host any of the files we index), we are not infringing on any of your, or anyone else's copyrights. If, while using our service, you find evidence of copyright infringement, we would first suggest that you bring up the matter directly with the users offering the copyrighted material for download.

We are unwilling to stop offering this valuable service to the public, as you ask, simply because some users may have submitted copyrighted material they are hosting to the index. OpenNap, unlike the once-popular Napster service with which you are familiar, is a _general purpose_ P2P search engine, which lets users search for any type of file (including documents, programs, source code, images), not just recorded music. It is for this reason that we are reluctant to let one potentially infringing use of the service, which is present in all general purpose search engines such as Google.com or Altavista.ca, deprive all our users of OpenNap's substantial non-infringing uses.

It seems your main rationale for asking WorldWithoutWire to block access to our server is the precedent set by the recent Napster Inc. "decision". Like you, we also follow the Napster Inc. proceedings with great interest. We are aware that the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals partially upheld the preliminary injunction against Napster Inc. While we disagree with this decision, we find it essentially irrelevant to our present situation. The preliminary injunction was issued against Napster because of "contributory infringement" of the copyrights held by members of your US counterpart, the RIAA. Perhaps you were unaware that contributory infringement is a concept not present in the Canadian Copyright Act? This crucial difference between U.S. and Canadian law means that while the transmission of copyrighted material published or found using "Napster-like" services may be prohibited, operating such a service in Canada is certainly not. To summarize, we will not stop running the OpenNap service because of a PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION issued in a considerably DIFFERENT CASE, in ANOTHER COUNTRY with substantially DIFFERENT COPYRIGHT LAW. However, as the operator of the service, we again encourage you to act in defense of your members' rights by directly contacting the users who are actually sharing your copyrighted material.

Thank you for your correspondence, and good luck with your future investigations,
CGC Systems Staff

I don't remember where I found this, (was around october/november last year), but I liked it so much I saved it on my puter...