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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."
Even they didn't support Macs, they were a good system when I was able to access them.
-----
Apple hardware still too expensive for you? How about a raffle ticket?
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
WinMX has just released v3.2! Get it while it's still not illegal and lame!
Using a non-spyware client version, it was the only place I could find the live sets from internet radio stations like Tag and Digitaly Imported. Now I guess Ill have to leave streamripper on 24/7 >.
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?
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?
Audiogalaxy has been a good source for music online. I will now have much greater difficulty finding and trying out new bands. This will of course result in fewer purchased CDs. Again, too bad.
Ciryon
None are as good, frankly. I've used WinMX and KaazaLight, but they seem to have trouble doing simple downloads of scarce mp3s (which is what I'm almost always grabbing). AudioGalaxy was excellent at locating the most obscure tracks, and providing a stable connection for you to grab the file from someone else.
The search was aslo much, much faster than anything I've seen, including Napster, and just seemed to be less of a pain. (Mind you, I was a Gold member - $15/6 months, no ads, faster site, well worth it. Or at least it was.)
Wait until the RIAA discovers NNTP, or IRC. Soon we won't be able to chat or recieve news in the name of copy protection.
I wonder what the RIAA would do if they found out that you could copy a CD and use a car to transport it.
DOWN WITH CARS!!!
m0rph
So... they settled to do just what it seems they were doing before the lawsuit. Only now, they are less the settlement money.
Isn't is "wonderful" how the world works?
Wow. Is it just me, or has every single song on audiogalaxy just been yanked? Other than featured artists, everything seems to be "permission denied".
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?
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.
Audiogalaxy, as proficient user, was lightyears ahead of Napster and way way beyond Kazaa & the crowd. When you had it working for you, it would provide the most amazing music sent TO you by groups of people with similar interests, guaranteed to be good. Their biggest liability was that they didnt have the money to compete with the RIAA. They're not in violation of anything besides listing whats on your hard drive; but legally, it would take millions to prove a simple point. All they ever sold was AG t-shirts. God bless them for trying; music will be as free as language (look at us reading without paying $$ for it) some day. No executive deserves 500k/yr for making children behave like Britney Spears. Fuck 'em for being soulless, immoral and soon to be dead.
I'd like to see this:
Today AudioGalaxy reached an out-of-court settlement with representatives of a class-action spyware suit. To sum up the settlement, AudioGalaxy will pay the spyware victims a lot of money and from now only provide programs for which the user has specifically given permission for the program to install"
Didn't they only provide songs that the copyright holder gave them permission for? From what I've heard and seen, Audiogalaxy removed songs that were copyright violations quite quickly, and had filtering software that blocked them from coming back.
Basically the settlement should read: AudioGalaxy settles with RIAA, buys protection, and avoids cement boots, and Guido.
Black and grey are both shades of white.
Opt in, essentially. Everything is blocked unless the record label goes out of its way to allow sharing. Those obscure releases... well, some small labels might actually opt-in. Then again, rare, out-of-print recordings from defunct labels will never be shared again. It's a sad story...
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
In compliance with the RIAA's wishes, Audiogalaxy.com has made its service almost totally useless, paid out most of its funding in fines, and ensured that the great percentage of its users have fled to another, as-yet-unknown, music sharing system.
Film at eleven.
When Napster was bombarded by suits and started to slowly die, many of the users moved to Morpheus (known as MusicCity at the time and running their own OpenNap network, IIRC). So who did the RIAA attack? Kazaa/Morpheus, of course.
AudioGalaxy is yet another of those sued by the industry, and yet another source of music is destroyed. What will this mean for users of the service?
They'll move to another service, such as BearShare, iMesh, or WinMX. Very few of them will bother finding true alternative sources, such as IRC channels or FTP servers. And what does RIAA do best? Look for popular services and nuke them.
This is in no way a flame towards those who decide to move to other services - however, it just seems to be becoming a trend for the RIAA to hurt larger services first.
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
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!
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
I got this when trying to look at the press release on RIAA's web site:
>HTTP Error 403
>
>403.9 Access Forbidden: Too many users are connected
Sums up their whole approach really.
"The message is clear - there is no place on the Internet for services that exploit creators' work without fair compensation." --Edward Murphy, NMPA
.001% of the dollars on an executive's quarterly report. That's the value of music, kids.
Of course. The recording industry would much rather let the record labels, executives, managers and lawyers do the exploiting of musicians, as always.
"This is a victory for everyone who cares about protecting the value of music," said Hilary Rosen, Chairman and CEO of the RIAA.
And by value, she means dollars, not musical or technical merit. But she doesn't mean the dollars spent in "payola" fashion to radio directors who decide which songs are put into rotation in key markets (and you thought your phone calls and emails picked which songs got played)... nor does she mean the dollars spent on flawed copy-protection schemes. She means
I'm left to wonder; where's the AG press release?
I believe that now is the right time to unleash a file-sharing IIS worm! What are they going to do? Drag Microsoft and thousands of NT server owners to court for providing software for file sharing?
Is this the beginning of a new business model for the RIAA? The steps:
1. Someone starts a p2p service.
2. Users of said service trade copyrighted material.
3. RIAA sues said service to prevent copyright infringement along the service's (virtual) pipes.
4. Service pays RIAA, files bankruptcy slightly later.
5. Goto step 1
Hmm, is it just me or is this a *really* big waste of venture capital and angel investing? You are paying the RIAA for the ability to trade priviledged material. The thing is, your copy is still illegal and someone is picking up your tab.
-Sean
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.
Understanding is a three edged sword. - Ambassador Kosh Naranek, Babylon 5
...cause the same thing worked *so* well for Napster!
AudioGalaxy is dead.
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.
God damn those dickshitting chancre-eating mongo fuckers!
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
Yes, there is song blocking in groups. For a couple of weeks now, file sends have been filtered for copyright, too. This also ended a hack I punched up that used two user accounts to dupe the system into sending copyrighted tracks.
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
Call me what you will (a troll, probably), but am I the only one here noticing how people are equating the legitimacy of AudioGalaxy with the end of its usefulness?
I'm not saying that getting pushed around by the xxAA's is a good thing, and sure, AG will now probably go the way of Napster. But really, folks, if the OSS community is going to gain standing (and a measure of its own legetimacy, I suppose) in the public eye, it really should stop blindly backing causes rooted primarily in software and music piracy, and start working on projects that are legally bullet-proof. That way, we can have software that is both useful And legal!
If you consider these terms to be mutually exclusive, your efforts will be an exercise in futility.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
if they're non mainstream and therefore non RIAA, would they not have the ability to give AG permission to distribute? "Opt in" is a phrase that comes to mind.
sulli
RTFJ.
I know it's a novel concept around these parts...
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I gotta say, the best file sharing program I have found for large files (like mpegs) is eDonkey2000. The linux client works really well, too. If you check out ShareReactor, 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.
.mp3s) than gnutella, but for big files (like mpegs), nothing beats it.
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
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
You can add src IP spoofing to that feature wishlist. It could be done with UDP transfers and an intermediary server for sending back retransmission requests.
The RIAA is making matters worse. If they truely think that the internet is responsible for them losing money, the worst thing they did was sue companies involved out of business.
If the RIAA had figured out a way of turning Napster/Audio Galaxy into a business, then the majority of music downloaders would be there using the service legitimately.
What has happened instead, is they shut down the popular way of getting music. The result is that the people hooked on this service are going to go underground and acquire music through alternative means. If they can't get music from Kazaa, then they'll head to IRC or other de-centralized sources.
They basically blew up the central location for music swapping, forcing everybody into smaller cells. Now, if the RIAA does ever provide a service, few people will head towards it.
Oops. Songs will still get traded, but now the RIAA has little to no hope of ever getting money for it. I'd feel sorry for them if they didn't call me a thief because I own a CDR-drive.
"Derp de derp."
Evry other Gnutella client i've tried has been crap, the searhes turn up nothing, and you can never down-load. that was until I found lime wire, I think it runs on the gnutella network, but it dosn't perform like it does,
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
When I used Audiogalaxy it was specifically to get live recordings, mostly of artists with a pro-trading stance (Bruce Hornsby, lots of indie artists, etc). Since the settlement is opt-in not opt-out for the copyright holders, am I going to lose that access unless the 'copyright holders' (meaning the record companies 'acting on behalf of their artists, yes?) specifically say it's ok?
That's a pain.
Triv
If you believe that Kadri Gopalnath would benefit from his music being distributed online for free, you are free to communicate your wishes to him barring extreme circumstances such as his being held incommunicado. Even if he is under contract, contracts are finite -- and if your case is SO CONVINCING that he would benefit, then surely you will be able to sway tens, no, hundreds of musicians from signing contracts with the EVIL RIAA and moving voluntarily to online distribution. All they need to do is grant permission instead of signing away their rights to somebody else, and they're into the WONDERFUL world of having their work distributed at large.
It's really their choice. Now, we have an interesting experiment -- how many artists will, in fact, move away from the RIAA model of massive marketing, and instead onto the P2P online distribution model? Or do they still seem to believe that the marketing and production actually *helps* them? Really, if the AudioGalaxy service fails to take off, there aren't that many possible conclusions other than that artists believe that the RIAA is offering a service of sufficient value as to outweigh these benefits of you listening to their music.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Doesn't Kazzaa still rely on a centralized server which can be shut down? That's the basical weakness of these systems.
If distributed systems like BearShare and LimeWire could provide the same experience that centralized-server based systems could provide, the RIAA would be toast. But that has yet to happen.
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.
:) 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.
:) )
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
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Amen. Me to. This is a baaaad thing. Most of the artists I downloaded from AG have been working at BK since the Internet has been big, and the only chance of finding catalog music of them in the record stores is about like finding clean water in Mexico.
RIAA is like Mack Bolan -- they are now fighting there private wars with a War Chest of dollars garnished from their enemies.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Because many people who look for files look for obscure music. They already have the Top 40 pap and Classic Rock cliches if they want them - and you know that that's exactly what the RIAA is going to release. Will they explicitly share, say, a Louis Andriessen composition? Nurse with Wound? Almost forgotten German pop-punk 70's group Trio? The brilliant Art Bears? The Ruins? Melt Banana? No, they won't. Those are just a tip of the iceburg of things I found on Napster in its heyday - now, these sorts of things get traded in relatively fugitive communities (Gnutella has been a disappointment for me.)
I'm with you 100%. I'm a person always on the hunt for obsure early '80s music. Some examples are Martha and the Muffins(no hope of getting anything from them), Missing Persons(bought a greatest hits cd, but there's more I want), Toni Basil(she had more than just "mickey"), and so on.
I found out that the more obscure the music, the better chances it had of flying under AG's copyright radar. Or, just switch the artist name and song, and you'd find it.
Darn. I'm really sad to see it go. Whether it's tracks from the Blue Thunder soundtrack, Pointed Sticks' "The Real Thing"(some obscure Canadian band), I was in '80s music heaven with tunes that commercial radio stations woulnd't even touch.
Darn.
Do you know a user how is, or just has lost access to this? Start looking.
:-)
Image how much of a difference we can make if each geek that wants to stick it to the RIAA helps 2 people get hooked up to real P2P networks, that aren't controlled by companies like that.
I use LimeWire myself, although I think it attaches adware to IE. While your at it, switch them to mozilla so they don't see that crap. They will love you.
Help a friend, and stick it to the RIAA an Microsoft at the same time.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Too bad that Gnutella CAN be blocked by ISP's. My local DSL provider decided to block the common gnutella ports. I have not been able to access it for the last 6 months.
Gnutella really needs random ports.
Curiously, Audiogalaxy was never blocked. R.I.P AG.
All great points, but you have to recognize that in the majority of cases, it isn't the "obscure" music that people are downloading with these tools. I hate to start this argument again, but we all know that most of the music traded using these programs is mainstream, copyrighted material that users download because they don't want to pay for it.
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.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Maybe people who want to download put mainstream, copyrighted material online, but those of us who would like to share usually share music we're excited about to get people interested in them. The leeches who just want to download the lastest Tool or Britney Spears or what have you are already well served by Usenet and IRC and have little to fear. But the group of people left out of the equation are the sharers - they are the ones who brought a dynamism to music listening and P2P, and they are the ones that the music industry is really frightened of - not (only) because of possible threats to their revenue model, but because it's a way of creating channels of listenership that threaten the top-forty-money-machine that they know and manipulate.
http://www.riaa.org/Contact.cfm
Instead of -- or perhaps in addition to, depending on how pissed off they are -- perhaps someone should start an open letter to the RIAA. Have enough community knowledge of and input on it, and it could easily get tens of thousands of (virtual) signatures. Then, maybe, just maybe they would start to give a shit.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
If you paid with a credit card, you can contest it with the card issuer -- service rendered was made nearly useless unexpectedly. Still, this sort of thing is why I don't pay for web "services." Don't want to be left screwed.
i am a soviet space shuttle
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), 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.
Will I retire or break 10K?
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.
When I used Audiogalaxy it was specifically to get live recordings, mostly of artists with a pro-trading stance
If you want to restore access to works by recording artists who 1. write their own songs (click here to see why) and 2. authorize public trading of live recordings and/or studio recordings, then by all means, contact the artists and ask them to put their songs on New Napster and AG. If you can't find them, put up a web site listing the names of the artists you can't track down, and then ask Slashdot if anybody else knows how to contact them.
Will I retire or break 10K?
> ... from now only provide songs for which the copyright holder has specifically given permission.
Have they really agreed to not broadcast any songs that are out of copyright? If so, the RIAA has really won something significant.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
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).
Man, and I thought the stuff I sold on the playground was a little shady.
- A.p.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
So where's the linux version [of KaZaA]?
Does KaZaA or WinMX work in Wine or ReWind? I looked for "Kazaa" in the Wine application database, and I found that kazaalite runs quite well if you use MS DLLs. So does WinMX.
Will I retire or break 10K?
As far as try-before-you-buy goes, how come no one ever complains that we don't get to preview entire movies before we decide to shell out for the tickets?
A movie is one coherent audiovisual work that tells a single story. Reviews dissecting every part of a movie are available in almost every imaginable news medium. On the other hand, a typical album is a recording comprising twelve musical works, unrelated except for having been recorded (and possibly written) by a single team of performers called a "band". (Themed albums are the exception to this rule, but they are also the exception in the pop marketplace.) It's hard to judge whether or not critics like a whole album because 1. the music reviews don't get as much publicity as the movie reviews, and 2. music listeners have much more diverse tastes than movie viewers.
It's about time media companies realized that if they want customers' money, they must work with their customers, not against them. To let listeners preview a whole album, I'd suggest that the label publicly release an MP3 file containing a representative 20 second snippet of each song for free promotional redistribution.
In addition, if the RIAA labels put up a site where I could download high-quality singles (MP3 encoded with LAME 3.92, preset r3mix) for $1.00 each, and the site showed exactly how much of my buck went to the songwriters and performers, I would sign up in a heartbeat. The most popular legit major-label MP3 site (eMusic, $15 per month for unmetered downloads) offers only 128 kbps MP3, and 128 kbps MP3 sounds like crap on my speakers because it throws away so much information.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The header indicates that a substantial sum was paid. How much was that? I have my doubts that it really was substantial. In this kind of dispute, 100k is chump change, although quite a real sum to me personally.
Anyone know?
There are several CDs I own that have several of the tracks scratched resulting them being nearly unintelligeble. I've been planning for a while to go to audiogalaxy to download the damaged tracks and burn a new working CD, guess that's out now :(
I stole this Sig
The next logical step is to kill kaaza...but then what? Gnutella? How does the RIAA expect to kill it? ISP-side measures here we come.
The thing that pisses me off the most about this is that I was paying for Audiogalaxy's gold membership. The RIAA could have asked Audiogalaxy to charge $6 instead of $3 a month and ask for half to cover royalties and such.
The idoicy in all of this astonishes me.
I'd only started using Audio Galaxy a week ago, via OpenAG. I was amazed at the depth, speed and reliability. I found pretty much everything I looked for. It was like the heyday of Napster.
It was good while it lasted. Thanks, Audio Galaxy people - you made one of the truly worthwhile things on the internet.
Since I used to run the audiogalaxy satellite on my Linux box and control it via the website - it worked rather well.
As I can't do that any more, can anyone suggest an alternative? Note that it needs to be runnable from a Linux terminal - so no graphical display (unless you control it via the website) and I absolutely positivily cannot install anything on my work PC.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Wait a minute, wasn't the RIAA not too long ago trying to get a ruling allowing them to not have to bother getting permission from the copyright holder songwriters on the songs they want to broadcast online? Now they want others to run around getting that individual permission.
i bought 8 CDs last week. five of them based on MP3s i downloaded. there's no way i'll ever hear any of those bands on the radio, since Clear Channel only plays 6 songs. and i won't hear them on college radio, since all *they* play is nu-metal and rap-metal. so, after reading good things about a bunch of bands, i went to AG, grabbed a couple of songs each and ordered CDs (from Parasol) of the bands that I liked.
so, the RIAA has just hurt Parasol, a fine independent label/CD store. this shouldn't surprise anyone, because Parasol doesn't carry many RIAA label acts, mostly just carry indies. of course it's in the RIAA's best interest to wipe out this kind of competition.
-c
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
that would make sense, but i'm afraid you are wrong. you underestimate the creativity and money at their lawyers' disposal.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
clearly my evil hoarding of live fugazi recordings had to be stopped.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yes, but shutting down AG will only stop the obscure music. 99% of the users will move to Kazaa or Gnutella or WinMX or Grokster and they will have the exact same files available, except for the obscure ones.
Bottom line: everyone else gets their Nikelback (does that lead singer have any concept of what a douchebag he looks like?) and I don't get my Jeff Mangum basement recordings. How's that for fair?
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
yeah then this company called Clearchannel bought all of my local radio stations, and I only hear the 10 songs that are also on MTV (which I hear in the distant past played music as well)
I'm leaving this fucking country.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
they can't leave their RIAA contracts, they are locked in to them for usually over a decade and for more releases than most bands ever record.
the artists can't allow Audiogalaxy to share their music because ***they don't own their own copyrights***
they sign the contracts because they aren't lawyers and don't know what they're getting themselves into. that and the RIAA's deals with MTV, Ticketmaster, Clearchannel, and retail stores insure that not signing with the RIAA = wallowing in obscurity. Phish is probably the only modern band to make it without massive RIAA support, and their marketing scheme really only works for trad rock.
and Kadri Gopalnath isn't an RIAA artist, which was the parent's point to begin with.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Ever heard of Hadiqa Kiani? No? Dare you to try to get her stuff on CD -- since it's only available on cassette, and it's damn hard to even find in North America...except online.
Mind, she's only Pakistan's most popular female recording artist, and her first album sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and she's only the second female artist ever to get a promotional contract with Pepsi (the first was Gloria Estefan), but that's not important.
The point is, there IS stuff you just...can't...get any other way, and that's the stuff that most of us (here) get online. Frankly, I would actually rather have a real CD, because I like the liner notes and the album art and all that stuff.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
People will say this isn't technically feasible. It's certainly complicated. Who generates the DRM flag? Windows XP 2006? Maybe. Who stops them from hacking the system to forge it? No one, necessarily...
;), the cable trust already has, and the baby bells are about to get, 100% freedom from competition, guaranteed by the FCC. In some cases the media companies already own the cable themselves. But in any case it's pretty easy to get all the relevant parties in a room and work out a deal.
But you're right in principle, and I'll tell you why.
Since deregulation is now just a codeword for laissez faire
P2P software is kind of a drain on bandwidth. And how hard will it be to get the broadband ISP monopolists to raise their rates, to start charging per K? They were planning on doing it anyway, once they eliminated the competition!
This, my friends, is much better than censorship. It's cen$or$hip. Cheap internet data delivery hurting your real-world data delivery (i.e. RIAA) business? Don't compete! Just make the internet expensive!
The baby bells and cable companies will even whine that without the price hikes, they'd go out of business, and they'll talk about northpoint, or qwest. Pay attention, because that's going to be some high-art corporate cheese. Those are the TA-1996 "client-competitors" the baby bells just murdered with their own bare hands.
Here's a hint. When a big stinking monopoly tells you they need to raise their rates, they're lying, unless they're willing to open their books.
Watch the FCC. Oh yes, and if you have ISP service through a DLEC, get ready to switch.
We're on the road to Tycho.
Right. There is no spyware, unless you install the Windows version for some unknown reason.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
So you don't like the RIAA? Then try thinking about an alternative. There are a lot of smart people here, we can make a new system that works better than the old one. It's surely worth a try!
Will someone with more 1337 programing skills then I please make an open audio glaxey server? There is already an open clinet, and IIRC the user interface is already open, could someone please just start up a non-centeralized server that dosn't block songs?
That would be sooo damn cool.
All i can do is send a big FUCK YOU out to mainstream media, and the RIAA.
/. readers were getting music from AG, and that is why there is so much hostility in this thread. I think that THIS should be the last straw.. I think that we all need to make an INTENTIONAL decision to NOT buy CDs.. ever again.
Most of us know that mainstream media sucks. Most of us hate almost everything on the radio, because there is no variety. For those of us who have tasted the music from foreign artists can attest, the pop-crap stations with their pathetic-repeat-every-45-minute playlists can just burn in hell.
But then again there are [people] out there that actually like this CRAP because it's been spoon-fed to them since their conception. It's all about control. Media conglomerates want you to eat what THEY want to feed you. It's absolute lunacy.
Most of the stuff I listen to comes from artists who have ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with the RIAA, groups that never 'sold out' to this satanic cult. Where's the justice for these groups? These groups who come over from Europe every year, and find that their followers are growing faster than they could ever had imagined? These groups who were discovered on the likes of Audiogalaxy by all these new fans. These groups who actually DON'T CARE that people share their music?
I buy a lot of CDs, or at least I used to. Back when I was brainwashed and thought that paying for the CD helped out the artists. I know better now. I'm upset that I helped pump dollar after dollar into some fat-ass RIAA exec's wallet.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and state that MOST of
Trade music, copy mp3s to CD and distribute them in public places. Do whatever it takes to spread the word about non-mainstream artists, and don't buy CD's for the crap-40 bands that are playing on the radio. Not only will this put the RIAA in serious financial harm, it will also promote the artists that you like to listen to.
If you want to support the artists, go out of your way to attend concerts... offer them cash in person.. buy them a drink or two.. offer to take them out after the show. These things aren't that crazy, I've done all of these things. Ask them if they have any merchandise to sell, and if not make suggestions. These are sources of income that sidestep the Nazi-istic ways of the RIAA.
Sorry for the rant. It's just funny that so many of you bitch about the RIAA, when in fact you are perpetuating it's existance.
Maybe we should offer counter-intelligence to the Al-qaeda forces, and tell them that the RIAA's headquarters is the new whitehouse. Maybe we will all get lucky.
-fc
. echo -e \\04 >
Ok, here's the scoop:
You can't produce a copy for "general use" without a certificate issued by a CA like VeriSign. This required an arbitrarily large amount of cash, and strong identification when you obtain the cert.
The filtering would be done by the backbone providers. First time you see a new file, check it's certificate. Store the ID of the cert and a simple, fast (i.e. could-be-done-in-hardware) checksum. Now, when you see files on the wire, look up the checksum vs. your tables, and make sure it's OK.
Ugly? Sure.
But doable?
Certainly.
Unfortunately, the implications for civil liberties and freedom of speech are **extreme**.
I don't think that this is inevitable, by the way, but I do think that unless we're very capable and fast, there is no doubt we are going to end up with a solution like this or even worse.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,