Two weeks ago, the RIAA sent out another batch of 407 pre-litigation letters to students of 18 universities asking them to pay at least $3,000 for illegal file sharing.

The text of the pre-litigation letters has instructions on not spoiling evidence:

Now that you are aware that a lawsuit may be filed against you, there is an obligation for you to preserve evidence that relates to the claims against you. In this case, that means, at a minimum, the entire library of recordings that you have made available for distribution as well as any recordings you have downloaded, need to be maintained as evidence. Further, you should not attempt to delete the peer-to-peer programs from your system – though you must stop them from operating. For information on how to do this, you may visit www.musicunited.org.

The problem is that you go to the musicunited.org site and have to figure out where to go for the information. I dug around until I found that the information they were probably referring to was the Take It Off link which has their own instructions on how to turn off file-sharing in KaZaA. It also has:

Go to the University of Chicago’s Network Security group’s web page to see how to disable file sharing in other programs.

Unfortunately, that link on the Music United page is dead; University of Chicago’s comprehensive listing of instructions on how to disable file-sharing has moved to another page. I found it by doing a search for “disable file-sharing” on the University of Chicago site, something the RIAA shouldn’t expect everyone to do. The RIAA also advises ISPs/Universities to refer their users to the Music United site in their DMCA Complaints about copyright infringement.

I searched all over the Music United site for a contact address to notify them of the broken link, but there’s no contact information listed on the entire site! I finally resorted to a whois lookup, but ironically didn’t get any results for musicunited.org. I also tried a web version for whois and that also didn’t turn up with a directory listing.

I ended up emailing the Security group at the University of Chicago asking them if they could add a redirect for that page and cc’d webmaster@musicunited.org (guessing that might be a valid address), but three days later:

And no redirect. It’s been five days. My colleague, curious about the strange whois behavior, then ran the whois command and it worked and I was getting whois information, too. (I wish I took a screenshot because it really wasn’t working earlier!). Anyway, surprise surprise on the Registrant’s Name:

FINALLY, scrolling down… a tech email contact!

And so I email the RIAA and:

As a side note, the webmaster@musicunited address didn’t work (or any other @musicunited.org address for that matter) because they don’t have an MX record:

The RIAA needs to improve their education efforts by providing more direct instruction and obvious links if they are pointing people to information and resources. And not having a webmaster@ email address in place violates the RFC Internet Standard for Mailbox Names for Common Services, Roles and Functions. At the very least, list a freakin’ contact email on the website! But what’s worse is the second violation - ICANN’s requirement to list accurate whois information. I can’t even easily contact the appropriate person to tell them they need to fix their site.