US music firms silence mainland Web site

A mainland Web site that offered free downloads of pirated songs has closed down following a music industry lawsuit in the United States.

Unlike most Chinese Web sites Listen4ever was designed for an international rather than domestic audience. The site was in English and offered thousands of freely downloadable tracks from artists including Christina Aguilera, Bruce Springsteen, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Eric Clapton, Toni Braxton, Barbara Streisand and Whitney Houston. It did not offer music by Chinese artists.

The site paid its way by advertising, using several advertising partners including the Doubleclick network.

On Friday a group of 13 record companies including Vivendi Universal, Sony Music Entertainment, Bertelsmann's RCA and AOL Time Warner sued several major Internet carriers, alleging their routing systems allowed users to access Listen4ever and unlawfully copy recordings.

The copyright suit seeks a court order to force AT&T Broadband, Cable & Wireless, Sprint, Advanced Network Services and WorldCom unit UUNet to block Listen4ever traffic.

AT&T Broadband official Sarah Edler told the New York Times it was the first time the company had been asked to block access to a foreign site.

The companies chose to sue the Internet carriers because they were unable to identify the site's authors in order to sue them in China.