AudioGalaxy Reaches Settlement With the RIAA 392
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."
I liked AG. (Score:2, Interesting)
chown -R riaa * ; chmod -R -r * (Score:4, Interesting)
I *know* that there's indie stuff being shared that *was* okay to be posted (all of the SXSW demos, for example) but are now "permission denied" even though the artist in question has made the MP3s freely available.
Soooo, at a whim, the RIAA can chmod -r all songs offered through audiogalaxy, even those that they have no control over?
Just a thought (Score:3, Interesting)
RIAA
They certainly think they are, because they seem to be "representing" bands that are unsigned
So are they going to stump up the cash to these indie bands? ho ho ho.
Can some of these indie band file a class action lawsuit against the RIAA for anti-trust ?
Just a thought... IANAL
Re:Does This Change Anything? (Score:1, Interesting)
Well, I sure as shit never told anybody to block requests for Chinese Forehead, so this appears to be either "artist opts in" or 'Somebody else is claiming copyright on my stuff'
Re:Well, there goes another good service (Score:4, Interesting)
Audiogalaxy is/was an excellent service, underrated by many because of the obnoxious spyware they unfortunately propagated. No other p2p music sharing comes close, especially when it comes to finding older or rarer recordings.
We are a culturally poorer country for the damage the RIAA has inflicted on our rights to fair use. This is a sad day -- it's not O.K. to say, "well just use Kazaa/Gnutella."
Support the EFF [eff.org].
join groups (Score:1, Interesting)
FUCK!!! (Score:4, Interesting)
Last night I heard a great new artist on a shoutcast station (another non-approved media outlet that they're trying to shut down) and today when I go to sample a couple more tracks, I find everything is locked up.
Audiogalaxy was truly the best. It had just about every non-mainstream artist I'd ever heard of and then some. I've been buying CDs for the past two years exclusively based on stuff I've been able to sample from them.
Compared to Audiogalaxy, Gnutella, Limewire and Kazaa users have nothing but crap. You might as well try and shop for interesting music at Walmart.
Mainstream media can go BUTTFUCK ITSELF IN THE MOUTH. I'm still going to try and find stuff that gooses my juices but it's going to be harder to find and I won't therefore be buying as much. Not that the RIAA gives a bearded hag's ass--they only notice when someone buys the ten godzillionth unit of some spastic fucking living dead Franken-pop they sewed together out of Elvis Presley's anal warts and scraps from the dumpster out back Michael Jackson's plastic surgery disaster clinic.
Fuck. I reiterate, FUCKKK.
G
third party clients & servers (Score:5, Interesting)
This brings up my question, though: third party clients. Is there any reason the extant 3rdparty clients out there could not just be set to, instead of talking to the now-crippled audiogalaxy server, talk to some independent audiogalaxy workalike? How difficult would it be to create an open-source implementation of an AudioGalaxy server, given we already have many open-source third-party implementations of clients? OpenNAP meets OpenAG? Cut loose, the way GiFT has cut loose from kazaa.
I am just curious.
In the meantime, may i assume it would maybe be possible to take the idea behind audiogalaxy (everyone publicly queues stuff they'd like to download someday, and transactions are negotiated automatically as bandwidth becomes available on all sides) and someday recreate it as a wholly-decentralized gnutella-style network? Or do you need that central authority doing the negotiations for you to keep everything from falling apart? I would have to think about the idea some more. You could maybe do it. If you tried, how would the web page frontend thing be handled? Would we just have to throw that idea out?
I always thought that was the most disappointing thing about AG-- their "featured artists" were pretty good compared to (say) napster's, but i always thought it would be really neat if AG fufilled its potential as a site with a message board for every song in existence. This would be a godsend for those of us who like to collect really obscure music, especially bootlegs and such-- it would be convenient if, upon running across a track labelled (say) "Nine Inch Nails - eraser (Utter Desolation Remix -- Unreleased)" i could type that into a website, and even if i couldn't download the mp3 from there i could see some discussion and find out "this is fake" or "this is from X bootlegs & rarities compilation" or "this is a b-side from the japanese single of Y, only they renamed it". Allmusic.com meets everything2.com, or something
Ah well, idle wondering. In the meanwhile, i guess now i gotta go hit AudioGalaxy's site to find out how to inform them i give them permission to redistribute the music i own the rights to.. (Not that anyone *wants* to listen to my music.. just that it's the principle of the thing
Re:RIP audiogalaxy (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm all about freely trading music by artists without ties to the RIAA, because in most cases, that works to the advantage of the artists. However it's when you cross over to the material owned by the RIAA that you ask for trouble.
Perhaps artists would be better off without these labels (a discussion for another day) but if they want to give up their rights (and their material) to the labels who don't care for anything but the bottom line and restrict the exposure of their music, ultimately it's their choice to do so.