Media Rights Technologies,which has patent pending technologies for securing streaming audio, has initiated another legal challenge. In a letter to the Library of Congress, MRT's outside counsel asks that certain statutory webcasting liceneses be revoked. The targets of this latest MRT initiative include AOL, Clear Channel , iTunes, Live 365, MSN Music, Napster, Pandora, RealNetworks, Rhapsody and Yahoo.
All of the Subject Webcasters distribute digital content over systems that avoid existing and effective technical measures designed to protect copyrighted content from unauthorized downloading, copying and re-distribution or use by recipients. Indeed, all of the Subject Webcasters incorporate or accommodate stream ripping capability within their systems. Literally thousands of different stream ripping devices are sanctioned by the Subject Webcasters. Further, all of the ephemeral recordings made by the Subject Webcasters are similarly unprotected from copying, in direct violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of paragraph 112 (a)(1) and (e). By transmitting copyrighted matter through such systems, the Subject Webcasters enable the recipients of their unprotected transmitted sound recordings to select particular sound recordings that can be downloaded and converted into perfect digital phonorecords. These digital phonorecords are then capable of being used, re-distributed or re-transmitted-all without authority from the copyright owners or payment of royalties. [Footnotes omitted]
