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

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?

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.