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."

Comments

one problem solved, how about another?

[I Want GNU!]

Now that a copyright infringement suit has been settled, maybe the RIAA could agree to stop its illegal actions of price gouging and acting as a trust? And maybe they could stop bribing politicians as well?

Great, what about MY songs?

[Jon Howard]

What about the MP3's I'm sharing of my music?

I suspect it's going to be a bit of a pain in the ass to convince Audiogalaxy to allow me to share my band's music over their service. How can I satisfy them that I'm truly the copyright holder? If it's easy enough to make it painless, what's to keep others from attempting to get their favourite artist's music unprotected using the same technique?

Re:Great, what about MY songs?

[sulli]

Are you the copyright holder? Well then:

The settlement reached would allow Audiogalaxy to operate a "filter-in" system, which requires that for any music available, the songwriter, music publisher, and/or recording company must first consent to the use and sharing of the work.

If you are the copyright holder, which you are unless you have signed your rights away to a RIAA member, then you should inform AudioGalaxy that you would like to allow your music to be shared that way. AG will be within its rights to distribute it, since you will have given permission.

IANAL but I suspect that a letter signed by you claiming that you are the copyright holder should be sufficient. Or you could check to see what MP3.com does. Now AG may take a while to handle such things, but then again they are now actually in the world of all indie music rather than the world of claiming that it's all about indie music as a PR fig leaf, so if they don't they will be 100% instead of just 99% toast.

Opposite Effect Achieved

[SirKodiak]

From article:

"The message is clear - there is no place on the Internet for services that exploit creators' work without fair compensation," added Edward P. Murphy, President and CEO, NMPA.

And thus, this sad chapter of history has ended. No longer can rufians download music on the internet, making the delivery channels of CD, tape, and vinyl the only channels, ensuring that the copyright holders recieve their fair compensation. The brief period of anarchy is at last over, likely forever.

Or, possibly, just possibly, decentralized services with no way to be shut down are still around, and will always be around, and the RIAA is trying to close the cell doors after the inmates have already taken over the prison.

Well, good luck to them. As they kill those services that have any sort of control mechanism in place, all that will remain is those services that they can't control, which are precisely those services which can't be used to make money for the publishing industry. What may have taken a decade of evolution from central-controlled P2P to fully-distributed P2P is being encouraged to take place in a couple of years. The dinosaurs aren't just being replaced by mammals, they're encouraging them to do it as quickly as possible.

This is only the beginning.

[vkg]

In case you haven't been paying attention

THESE MOFOS ARE GOING TO TRY AND DO THIS TO THE ENTIRE INTERNET

Filtering of all content, on the backbone, to remove anything without DRM flags indicating it's OK to transmit is both technically feasible and completely coherent with increasing government demands to be back in control of the internet.

Welcome to the future of the internet: we call it television, and we'll tell you what you can see!

Re:So...what's it gonna be?

[KoshClassic]

AG is effectively dead even at this moment (EVERY song has the infamous "X" logo next to it instead of the satellite dish.

But the crux of the settlement is that in order for AG to let you download a song, they supposedly have to be given explicit permission by the copyright owner to allow the song to be traded through AG - whereas before, they had a model where it was up to the copyright holder to instruct them to block the song.

Bottom line then is that AG may once again become a good resource for well known material from popular bands (as someone might bother to let them trade this stuff for some type of fee), it will never again be a good resource for obscure stuff - old songs from less popular band's back catalogs, live radio appearances etc. - the copyright holders will never bother to give AG permission to allow that stuff to be swapped. In the end the Big Brother that is the RIAA and their DMCA cronies have dealt yet another serious blow to the rest of us todayt.

I don't like this stupid RIAA.

[rice_burners_suck]

I strongly believe this is an unacceptable settlement. An acceptable settlement is one where a business arrangement is reached whereby both parties benefit from the agreement. For example, a deal whereby some small fee is paid to the RIAA for each copy of a song downloaded or sold, in exchange for RIAA marketing muscle supporting the scheme. This would most likely bring more benefits to both parties than the current scheme, which will screw over AudioGalaxy and give no extra profit to the RIAA.

Conclusion? The boring, gray-haired old men in charge of the RIAA have absolutely no imagination whatsoever. Only a lot of greed. And greed is their downfall. Case in point: If music (and indeed, other "content" such as movies) was sold for much cheaper, I believe the RIAA would increase volumes tremendously and make more profit than under the current scheme, where laws are passed left and right to protect the alleged right of the RIAA to eternal profit. Suppose an album you wanted cost $8.00 to $10.00 (USD), rather than the outrageous $18.00 that many albums cost nowadays. I believe that most people would find it so much more convenient to buy an album than to download 300 copies of a song in search of a good quality rip. Further, I think that music should be sold online, for extremely low prices. An album that sells for $8.00 in the store might go for $2.00 if downloaded, as the buyer doesn't get a nice shiny CD, case, booklet, and all kinds of other stuff. The copy available at the store would include all sorts of cool stuff (including coupons to direct customers to other music they might like), giving people a good reason to actually buy the music.

Finally, I think everyone should fight for their fair use rights. If you buy a CD, you should be allowed to make as many copies as you want for your own use. For example, I never take my original CDs into my car, as they could get jacked or lost or melted in the heat or something. It would be even more convenient if my stereo played MP3 CDs, so I could put all my albums on a few discs and not have to endanger myself and others while driving to change CDs around.

But like I said, those idiot gray-haired old geezers in control of the RIAA have no style or imagination. They're a bunch of boring old men with no goal in life other than to make themselves appear elevated by crushing others.

Re:I don't like this stupid RIAA.

[Stonehand]

And it would be convenient, to, for Mercedes-Benz to only sell cars at cost, but they are under absolutely no obligation to you to do so.

If AudioGalaxy weren't profiteering off copyright infringement, perhaps they wouldn't have gotten into this mess in the first place, any more than a thug or any other criminal deserves an "acceptable settlement".

The RIAA is entitled to charge whatever the market can bear -- and whether or not the market is truly involved (as in -- is it a price-fixing cartel?) is an actual, but completely separate, issue that does not justify willful infringement on their property except by judicial action if and when they are found to be being anticompetitive.

In any fair transaction (*), neither party can impose terms on the other -- there is always the option to walk away. You, as a customer, may choose not to buy a CD -- but you are not then entitled to the music in any form if you reach no agreement. The copyright holder may choose not to sell at a price or in a form that you desire -- but it is then not entitled to seize your money. Both sides may negotiate, but the main principle of reasonable theories of entitlement is an informed consent -- both sides should properly disclose their terms, and no transaction takes place unless agreed upon.

(*) Determining the ethics of state transactions is often hairy. So, for that matter, are nigh-automatic transactions such as pollution; in that case, determining compensation becomes a problem.

Re:chown -R riaa * ; chmod -R -r *

[Manitcor]

One wonders if that might be one of the hidden motivations of RIAA other than simple pirating.

If an artist can easily get worlwide distrubution and play without them. What happens to RIAA. Granted it would take many years. I could see a world where bands are all distrubuted on the net and the only thing we pay for is a live preformance.

Of course this has been discussed to death in the past.