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

third party clients & servers

[mcc]

On the contrary, in my opinion, AudioGalaxy was the absolute best such service for the mac because AG didn't support it. AG was shit for windows becuase of the cruddy client, but for the mac it was great because you just used one of the non-supported third-party clients, all of which were excellent.

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 :) Could a community-run version of such a website somehow tie into a decentralized community-run version of the AudioGalaxy idea? How would the client and the website communicate? A browser plugin, maybe? It would have to be something sufficiently disconnected to stave off the Out of Court Settlement Smackdown.. perhaps each webpage on the website could have an ID number / checksum, and you'd just cut&paste that ID number into your OpenGalaxy Client? Perhaps the "download this song" thingy could be inserted via some kind of variation on thirdvoice, and the people who run the website could just insist, honestly officer, we can't help it if the mp3 pirate people choose to use our database as a base for checksumming and such. We just run a message board. We aren't connected to those people. These aren't the bots you're looking for.

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 :) )