esting out a tactic to combat online piracy, a group of record companies asked a judge yesterday to order four major Internet service providers to block Americans from viewing a China-based Web site that offers thousands of copyrighted songs free of charge.
The 13 record labels that filed the suit in Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan say the site, Listen4ever .com, is "even more egregious" than the music-sharing service Napster, which was shut by a court order.
But in the Napster case, the recording industry sued Napster itself. The new action is the first time record companies have sought to compel the companies that control the Internet backbone to intervene. The four companies named in the suit are AT&T Broadband, Cable and Wireless, the Sprint Corporation and UUNet Technologies. The record labels in the lawsuit include Sony Music Entertainment, the Universal Music Group and RCA Records.
The lawsuit invokes an untested provision of a 1998 federal law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, that allows a court to order Internet providers to take limited steps to block offshore sites that violate United States copyright laws. Sarah Edler, a spokeswoman for AT&T Broadband, said the company had never before been asked to block access to a foreign site.
David Farber, a University of Pennsylvania computer scientist and an early architect of the Internet, filed an affidavit in the case, saying it would be relatively easy for the Internet companies to block the Internet address of the Web site without disrupting other traffic.
"It's not a big hassle," Mr. Farber said. "There's no way to stop everybody, but a substantial number of people will not be able to get access."
The companies named in the suit declined to comment. But a person who works closely with Internet providers said that they were concerned about how easy it was for a Web site to change Internet addresses. If copyright holders began asking them to block sites in large numbers, and to keep track of every new address, it could divert resources from running regular Web traffic.
Pirate sites that set up in countries that do not enforce United States copyright laws are a growing problem for the music and movie industries as they try to control the free exchange of their material online.
The Listen4ever site is written in English and appears aimed at an American audience. Yesterday, it was possible to download songs by Bruce Springsteen and music from the soundtrack of "Blue Crush."
The site thanks a list of "top uploaders" under a note that reads:
"Attention: all music files here are uploaded by lots of music fans for sharing free. These music files are only for trial listening, please don't use these for business purpose and delete these files after you listen, thanks! (support your favorite singers, please buy their CDs)."
An e-mail message sent to a Yahoo e-mail account, the only contact information on the site, was bounced back. The recording companies said the only information they were able to find was that the domain name appeared to have been registered to a person in Tianjin, China.
Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group that monitors digital copyright issues, said that the law allowed a court to refuse the copyright holder's request if it decided there was a less burdensome way to prevent the copyright infringement.
"Wouldn't it be better to get an injunction from a Chinese court to punish the people behind this?" Mr. Von Lohmann said. "Are we going to have a situation where rather than going after the actual wrongdoers we just go block all these sites?"
