AudioGalaxy Reaches Settlement With the RIAA

blanu writes: "Today AudioGalaxy reached an out-of-court settlement with the RIAA. To sum up the settlement, AudioGalaxy will pay the RIAA a lot of money and from now only provide songs for which the copyright holder has specifically given permission."

Meanwhile...

[Anonymous Coward]

WinMX [winmx.com] has just released v3.2! Get it while it's still not illegal and lame!

Re:Well, there goes another good service

[owlicks58]

Dude, Macsatellite has been around for a long time for classic, works fine. For OS X you can use Sputnix which is the best audiogalaxy client out there IMO, it's awsome

Re:Use something else?

[meta-monkey]

I gotta say, the best file sharing program I have found for large files (like mpegs) is eDonkey2000 [edonkey2000.com]. The linux client works really well, too. If you check out ShareReactor [sharereactor.com], they post up big lists of all kinds of files you can get off donkey, but of course there are many, many things on donkey that aren't listed on Sharereactor.

Donkey uses MFTP (I think Morpheus does too, now, actually...) where it takes a file, and hashes it to generate a unique ID across the network. Then, when you search for the file, you'll find many users with the same file, so it'll get different parts of the file from different users, speeding up the whole process. Also, people are forced to share any partial files they have, so the availability is usually pretty high.

I find it can be a touch slower for getting small files (like .mp3s) than gnutella, but for big files (like mpegs), nothing beats it.

Re:Purchase CDs?

[panaceaa]

You can say this all you want, but there is so much music out there that you can't buy anywhere in the US. Look at the BBC dance charts [bbc.co.uk] for instance. You can't buy any of those singles on CD. You can't buy more than 10 of them on vinyl easily because by the time they get on the charts, their first releases are sold out. And a good half of them will never be exported to the US anyway.

You could download most of them on Audiogalaxy, though. And if they get rereleased and exported to the US, people will know about them and they'll sell at record stores. Otherwise the only way to hear these songs is to buy dj compilations (usually with a 3-month delay to the charts) or go spend $40 covers going to dance clubs.

Licensing the underlying musical work

[yerricde]

If you are the copyright holder, which you are unless you have signed your rights away to a RIAA member

WRONG. If your recording is a cover of a published musical work, or even if it borrows a (surprisingly small) number of notes from a published work (see Handel v. Silver [everything2.com]), you are not the copyright holder, and distributing a recording of such a musical work infringes the copyright of the songwriter. You need to license the "mechanical rights" to the song from the music publisher, and AFAIK, that's both a pain in the ass and expensive unless you are affiliated with a major label.

Lag time...

[Pollux]

Don't worry about it. Here's my personal history with MP3s:

First discovered them in 1997, when I heard someone in my high school computer club playing "Walk Like an Egyptian" on a computer at school. I thought he was playing a CD, but instead, he told me about "MP3s." Three months later, I was looking for the same stuff online with my own computer. They were everywhere.

Music Industry's Response: "What are you talking about?"

Had a small collection of my favorite music (couldn't build up a whole library, thanks to my whoppin' 850MB hard drive) by 1998. Many of the sites appeared and disappeared quite fast, so I started searching for search engines. I soon stumbled upon (and stuck with) Audiogalaxy in 1999.

Music Industry's Response: "You mean people are getting our music for free? Where? Napster? Shut it down!"

I enjoyed Audiogalaxy, because there was no security threat of using P2P software (aka Napster / Gnutella), plus there were a lot of nice leech sites posted all over on their FTP search list. Sure, it wasn't as quick and as easy as Napster, but Audiogalaxy was flying under the radar, while Napster wasn't. There have been other websites, but none as direct. That is, until the industry finally found them.

Music Industry's Response: Hey, there are places out there besides Napster that hand out MP3s. Let's get everyone while we still can!

My point: It took the music industry four years to realize that there CDs were being transformed into MP3s. It took them four years to find Audiogalaxy and shut them down.

Whatever you find, I'd say it has a staying power of 4 years, unless they're quite public about it like Napster.

Re:Gnutella needs to get better..

[Hoser McMoose]

Fortunately Gnutella HAS become much better in the past few months. Two very important features have been added to at least three common Gnutella servants (Bearshare, Limewire and Gnucleus), Ultrapeers and swarming. Ultrapeers means that now a significantly lower percentage of the traffic on the Gnutella net is made up of pinging and ponging overhead, while swarming means that you can often download stuff FAST.

If you haven't tried a Gnutella client in the past four or five months (or tried an outdated one the last time), I'd recommend checking them out again. I personally use Gnucleus and find it to be the best of the three, though a lot of that is personal preference (though the lack of ad-ware/spyware helps, plus it's open source, which I like). Ohh, and if you want ultrapeers with Bearshare, you need to use the 3.0 betas, but I understand that those are starting to get reasonably stable now.

There's still a little ways to go, and it would really help if Morpheus used a halfway up-to-date client (they're still usingly mostly Gnucleus 1.6.0 code to the best of my knowledge, which isn't bad, but is missing many important features of the current Gnucleus 1.8.x code). I think that Bearshare also made the right choice by not allowing connections from any of the REALLY outdated clients, and if others did the same I suspect that the network would perform even better.

So, long story short, all those complaining about Gnutella should really give it another shot.

As for the legal aspects of Gnutella, really the RIAA can't stop it, but what's more important, they SHOULDN'T be allowed to stop it. Developers of Gnutella servants really and truly have no more liability to the software distributed on their network then Microsoft has for software transfered using IIS and Internet Explorer. We all know that the RIAA wouldn't THINK of going after Microsoft because MS has the money and legal might to stand up to them, and legally the Gnutella people shouldn't be any different. That being said, I HIGHLY expect the RIAA to sue many Gnutella developers in the near future expressly to put them out of business through legal costs (the fact that the RIAA doesn't have a valid case is of little consequence in the current American legal system.. long live the land of the free).

Re:Great, what about MY songs?

[TMB]

I did that earlier today. Here's the response I just got:

Thank you for your interest in sharing your music on the Audiogalaxy website. Unfortunately we do not have the resources at this time to verify copyright ownership of song files with 100% certainty. We hope to have a system in place in the near future.

[TMB]