Back in 2005, CDT filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission against two Web sites that claimed to offer “100% Legal” music downloads. In reality, the sites essentially provided access to popular peer-to-peer file sharing networks, where copyright infringement is common. But because the sites charged subscription fees, in addition to making claims of legality, it wasn’t hard to see how consumers might mistake the sites for legitimate, licensed services. The FTC agreed that there was deception going on, filed a lawsuit, and eventually reached a settlement.

Every now and then, CDT gets an email thanking us for bringing the complaint. Typically, the email explains that the Internet user was considering plunking down money to one of the sites named in the complaint, but first did a quick search on the site name. Up popped the CDT complaint–alerting the user that subscribing to the site wouldn’t necessarily buy the user lawful access to the promised music. So the email says, in effect, “thank you for warning me so I wouldn’t waste my money.”

That got us thinking, maybe there are other sites out there that Internet users could misperceive as licensed, fee-based music services, when in fact the sites have no such license. Such sites not only dupe individual consumers; by sowing confusion, they undermine the development of the legitimate online music marketplace. But bringing lots of FTC complaints would be cumbersome, and not all such sites make such blatantly deceptive claims as “100% legal.”

Through the magic of search engines, however, the mere presence of the original complaint on our site was providing useful information to people doing a quick pre-purchase inquiry. So we figured if we listed other sites likely to confuse consumers, search engines would find those, too, and we could provide a useful warning to people seeking information about a broader range of sites.

That’s the genesis of CDT’s new “Music Download Warning List.” We did some searches for terms like “music download” and investigated some of the sites that popped up. We found over 30 sites that we think could leave Internet users with a mistaken impression about what the sites are really offering. More details about the specific criteria we used are included with the list itself.

We hope to grow this site and have it be a tool consumers can use if they’re at all concerned about the claims being made by a music download site. There are probably other sites that could qualify of course, the Internet is a big place, but we think our list is a good place to start.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 26th, 2007 at 9:34 am and is filed under CDT, Digital Copyright. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.