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

Meanwhile...

[Anonymous Coward]

WinMX has just released v3.2! Get it while it's still not illegal and lame!

Re:Well, there goes another good service

[owlicks58]

Dude, Macsatellite has been around for a long time for classic, works fine. For OS X you can use Sputnix which is the best audiogalaxy client out there IMO, it's awsome

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?

[rhizome]

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?

As an independent artist, you're obviously illegitimate and not worthy of any exposure at all. Undoubtedly the only way around this little dilemma is to assign your copyrights to an RIAA affiliate for every means of distribution that they control.

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.

Re:Great, what about MY songs?

[TMB]

I did that earlier today. Here's the response I just got:

Thank you for your interest in sharing your music on the Audiogalaxy website. Unfortunately we do not have the resources at this time to verify copyright ownership of song files with 100% certainty. We hope to have a system in place in the near future.

[TMB]

NNTP

[m0rph3us0]

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

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

[hymie3]

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?

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.

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.

Re:Opposite Effect Achieved

[K8Fan]

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.

Hilarious, isn't it? This is exactly like those Soccer Moms who wipe every surface with low-grade antibiotics and insist the doctor give their rugrat antibiotics for their every cold. It's utterly useless, and the only result is to produce stronger and tougher viri.

They killed Napster, which allowed them to see what music millions of people collected. They just killed AudioGalaxy which gave them the same information. Any businessman with a fractional clue could have figured out how to use that information to build a profitable business. Now, they've lost the potential for getting any information at all.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

and hopefully, in the near future

[Chardish]

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"

IIRC

[loucura!]

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.

In further news...

[shut_up_man]

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.

Just a thought

[oPless]

RIAA ... Monopoly ?

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

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!

Access Forbidden

[Roy Ward]

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.

Re:Well, there goes another good service

[pussycat]

Author of Sputnix here -- thanks for your kind comment.

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.

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.

FUCK!!!

[Groucho]

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

Purchase CDs?

[Wakko Warner]

I know it's a novel concept around these parts...

- A.P.

Re:Purchase CDs?

[panaceaa]

You can say this all you want, but there is so much music out there that you can't buy anywhere in the US. Look at the BBC dance charts for instance. You can't buy any of those singles on CD. You can't buy more than 10 of them on vinyl easily because by the time they get on the charts, their first releases are sold out. And a good half of them will never be exported to the US anyway.

You could download most of them on Audiogalaxy, though. And if they get rereleased and exported to the US, people will know about them and they'll sell at record stores. Otherwise the only way to hear these songs is to buy dj compilations (usually with a 3-month delay to the charts) or go spend $40 covers going to dance clubs.

Re:Purchase CDs?

[Technician]

I know it's a novel concept around these parts...

Are you kidding? I just bought 2 spindles of 100.

Re:Use something else?

[meta-monkey]

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.

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 .mp3s) than gnutella, but for big files (like mpegs), nothing beats it.

The RIAA shot themselves in the foot...

[NanoGator]

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.

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 :) )

Re:And so, as another one dies..

[schnell]

Just curious, has anyone heard of any attempts by services such as these to buy copyrights from artists and challenge the RIAA as a legitimate (competing, rather than RIAA-owned) distributor on legally even ground?

It's a nice idea, but it doesn't work like that. I'm sure that artists may be amenable to the idea, but major artists simply aren't going to be able to do that. For albums released by major labels (smaller labels as well, IIRC), the artist/songwriter owns the song, but NOT the actual recording of it that appeared on the album. So all those tracks that came off an album are owned by the publisher, not the artist - and there's a snowball's chance in Hell that you'll get them to sell that (or license it, either - they can't even agree on fairly doing that between themselves for their lame online music services, let alone fairly licensing it to some young startup whippersnappers).

"Okay," you say, "so the artists don't own the actual recordings (that particular performance that's on the album) ... so why don't they re-record it (since they own the song itself) and sell or license that to someone else?" Unfortunately, most major artists are under contract to large record labels - so if they record a new version, their label gets first dibs. That also includes "official" live recordings, too. BTW, live bootlegs, even if the band turns a blind eye to their existence, are theoretically just as illegal as pirated album tracks, since the label the band is under contract to should get a chance to make money off the band is going to release it (and the band to get some royalties from it).

Lastly, don't blame the bands for making these "deals with the devil" - yes, it handcuffs them to have the rights to their next X albums' worth of songs locked into a big nasty music label - but when you're struggling to make it, the offer of financing to make albums, distribution networks to get you on the radio and in Tower Records is nothing to sneeze at. They're just trying to make it when they sign these deals - nobody else right now can offer them the same things that the major labels can.

Maybe the real hope lies in bands that use the big labels to get popular, then after their contracts expire use the 'net intelligently to reach their fans. But unless rock stars start reading Slashdot daily (or someone can convince them that there's a really solid plan for not losing their fiscal shorts in the effort), we may be waiting a while.

Re:RIP audiogalaxy

[Lemmy Caution]

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.

Licensing the underlying musical work

[yerricde]

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.

Lag time...

[Pollux]

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.

Re:Well, there goes another good service

[colmore]

frankly i think the RIAA is a price fixing monopoly gouging the customers and the artists left and right. when you pay $18 for a new CD (and $18 CDs won't just be for Sam Goody any more - look out) your favorite band gets about 50 cents. Most of which goes off to pay their debt to their record company, which owns the copyrights to their songs for like 40 years. Download the music, see them play live, and buy a T-Shirt, you get more, the band gets more, nobody loses but the criminals.

The RIAA only has the power it does because they have used their massive weight to insure that you can *only* gain popularity through them. The large CD distributors and retailers have exclusive deals with the big record Co.s MTV will never play a minor label artist, and neither will Clearchannel (who owns over half of all radio stations in America)

to think that popular music was once a medium of freedom and rebellion, or at least made a passable effort of pretending to be. these days it's just another hollywood, only far far worse.

hey kids, want to be rad, want to be a star? forget the damn guitar, start writing novels, or maybe learn to paint, it's more respectable, and your ass won't be so sore after dealing with the suits.

Re:Notice this is an RIAA PR

[colmore]

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.