In prepared remarks delivered to Congress (PDF) on Wednesday, Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) CEO Cary Sherman said that the movie and music industries are working behind the scenes to encourage major Internet companies to voluntarily censor the Internet in an effort to better protect intellectual property rights.
Sherman’s testimony came amid a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on “The Future of Audio,” during which members of Congress were considering allowing FM receivers be inserted into next generation smartphones, which would see radio stations paying more in performance rights. Sherman, however, decided to talk about piracy, saying that despite the growing popularity of legitimate online music streaming services, illegal downloading is still essentially killing the industry and more must be done to fight it.
“We hope other intermediaries like search engines will… [negotiate] voluntary marketplace best practices to prevent directing users to sites that are dedicated to violating property rights,” he told the committee.
Despite Sherman’s hopes, that’s not likely to happen.
Search giant Google has been an ardent defender of the same cloud-based storage websites the RIAA calls “rogue,” and even filed an amicus brief on behalf of one so-called “cyber locker” website earlier this year in a prosecution brought by the movie and music industries, accusing the site of a copyright infringement conspiracy. Their attorneys argued that the movie and music industries fundamentally misunderstand the law and are trying to use it in an abusive manner, to the point where they are actually threatening the very existence of the social Internet.
The same groups were behind an enforcement action carried out against user-upload site MegaUpload.com, which Sherman hailed as a landmark achievement for the industry. “The indictment of MegaUpload has had a tremendous impact on other such rogue cyberlocker sites,” he said. “The government’s action sends a signal that the UnitedStates will not tolerate the use of the Internet for criminal activity that violates our laws.”
