MP3Board, a website that aggregates links leading to MP3 music files elsewhere on the Internet, on Tuesday (7/18) filed a counter-lawsuit against the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The suit is the second that the company has filed against the RIAA, and comes in response to a copyright infringement lawsuit that the RIAA filed against MP3Board last month.

On June 2, MP3Board issued a preemptive strike against the RIAA when it filed in a California Federal District Court its first suit against the record-label advocacy group. The suit claims that the RIAA has been trying to shut down MP3Board without cause, and asks the court to define exactly what kind of content and services MP3Board should legally be allowed to provide on its site.

The suit also seeks unspecified damages for a 5-day period of time during which, claims MP3Board lawyer Ira Rothken, MP3Board was shut down after the RIAA threatened MP3Board’s “backbone” service provider into pulling the plug on the company,

In the weeks leading up to the filing of MP3Board’s original lawsuit, the RIAA had been sending cease-and-desist letters to the company, Rothken said. In those letters, the RIAA reportedly claimed that the site--which provides both aggregated, stationary links and searchable links that direct users to copyright-protected music housed on third-party websites--was providing an illegal service and was knowingly helping to facilitate copyright-infringement violations by its users.

“We don’t think linking [from our site to copyrighted MP3 files on third-party sites] is enough to have a copyright-infringement [case], otherwise all the search engines [on the Internet] would be breaking the law,” said Rothken. “You can go to any search engine and type in ‘Madonna’ and get a similar result.”

The RIAA disagrees, and on June 23 answered MP3Board’s opening salvo by filing a copyright-infringement lawsuit--similar to one it filed earlier this year against Napster--against MP3Board.

In its suit, the RIAA alleges that, as evidence that MP3Board knowingly violated copyright laws, the site “actually created a genre called ‘Legal MP3s’--an explicit admission that the remaining material on the site is illegal. In addition, many of the links that [MP3Board] posts, on their face, evidence that the music is pirated, including such names as ‘SuperIllegalMP3z,’ ‘Free Illegal MP3 Files Direct Download’ and ‘The Biggest Archive of Illegal MP3 Flz.’”

Because the RIAA filed its suit in a Federal District Court in New York City rather than in the California court where MP3Board filed its initial action, the two suits are considered to be separate matters. Thus, MP3Board responded on Tuesday (7/19) to the RIAA’s copyright-infringement suit by filing a counter-suit--identical to the suit it filed last month in California--in New York.

The two companies are now involved in a legal tug-of-war to determine whether their imminent court battle will take place in New York or California.

Meanwhile, in an effort to wholly remove from itself any onus of responsibility for providing its users with access to copyrighted works, MP3Board has announced plans to unveil “digital rights technology,” an automated process that it says will allow copyright owners to identify works that they own on sites such as MP3Board and to electronically submit a legal request that those works be removed from the site.

“The burden shifts right back to the one who rightly deserves it--namely, the copyright owners--to police their own content on the Internet,” said Rothken. “It demonstrates another valid purpose for indexing systems like MP3Board: to help people police their content on the Internet.”

The unveiling of the new technology is expected to take place within the next week, according to Rothken.

MP3Board CEO Lars Mapstead in a prepared statement issued on Tuesday (7/19) said that the “new digital rights technology … will assist copyright owners, like the RIAA's members, in automating the link searching and removal process, while reducing the burden on automated indexing systems like MP3Board.com. … No longer will crates of paper affidavits be required like in the Napster-Metallica situation.”

Mapstead added that the new technology will initially be offered exclusively on MP3Board’s site, but would later be made available for use elsewhere on the Internet.