March 26, 1999
Industry: RIAA and IFPI take legal action against Lycos and FAST to stem the tide of MP3 piracy

London, England. Two leading music industry trade organizations are pursuing legal manoeuvers against U.S. web search engine portal Lycos and its Norwegian technology partner FAST. The actions are centred on the Lycos MP3 audio file search feature, which launched with much fanfare less than a month ago. Lycos claims that its MP3 search provides access to more than 500,000 of the controversial audio files.

London-based IFPI, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, filed official criminal proceedings yesterday against FAST Search & Transfer ASA of Norway, the provider of Lycos' MP3 search technology. The suit alleges that FAST's search engine "encourages massive systematic copyright piracy" by indexing MP3 web sites that offer illegal music file downloads.

IFPI has called FAST's technology "a major obstacle for all those independent, new companies and artists who are looking to pioneer a legitimate on-line music market." The organization says that after conducting an extensive investigation of the files indexed by the FAST search engine, it found few legal MP3 files.

FAST representatives have rejected the charges, saying that IFPI should pursue action against the sites offering the illegal MP3 files, not the search service that simply catalogs them.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is carrying the threat directly to the doorstep of Lycos. RIAA, representing most of the major marketers of recordings in the US, said today that it is fed up with asking Lycos to get rid of its MP3 search functions, and will consider filing formal charges.

"RIAA is still in discussions with Lycos, because we believe that a collaborative solution is the best solution, as well as the quickest," says a statement released by RIAA president and CEO Hilary Rosen. "But I am frustrated about the slow pace at which progress is being made, and we are therefore examining all of our options including litigation."

MP3 (MPEG Layer 3) is a compression technology that allows sound recordings to be stored and transferred as computer files, and replayed with reasonably high fidelity. An MP3 file is about one twelfth the size of the equivalent digital data stored on an audio CD. The files can be transferred easily via download from the Web. While many sites offering pirated MP3's of copyrighted material for download have been targeted by individual record companies or artists, these latest actions are the first attacks aimed at search engines providing links to the files.

RIAA officials began calling Lycos to discuss its concerns when the MP3 search area was announced in early February. According to RIAA, Lycos responded with a commitment to work with the recording companies to eliminate unauthorized sound recordings from its search engine. But today, RIAA says that Lycos has been too slow to make good on its promises.

"Lycos has continued to repeat its commitment in words, but it has done very little to honor it in practice," Rosen stated. "After numerous delays, Lycos (and its Norwegian partner FAST) met with RIAA about the problem, but offered to do very little as a practical matter to eliminate from its search engine the hundreds of thousands of links to pirated copies of sound recordings."

While waiting for a response from Lycos, RIAA says it has been investigating numerous complaints from record labels, artists, songwriters, producers, and other members of the music community about the pirated songs available through the Lycos directory. RIAA reports that it has continued to close down sites hosting these files and that it intends to continue its aggressive search for illegal MP3's.

Web Site: RIAA
Web Site: IFPI

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