 
By Eliot Van Buskirk
Senior editor, CNET Electronics (6/21/02)
Last Monday night, a legion of music fans logged on to Audiogalaxy only to find that their song queues were suddenly empty and that every single tune on the network was blocked. Mailing lists of every stripe buzzed about the news the next day. What was going on?
The Audiogalaxy site was still up, the Satellite software could still connect, and searches continued to return results. And yet every search--even for songs that were not already blocked voluntarily by Audiogalaxy at the behest of record companies--returned a page saying "SEARCH PROHIBITED. You cannot request this song due to copyright restrictions. Please try a different search." Unbelievably, even all songs by the band currently promoted on the top
While this might make sense to those who think it's illegal to share MP3s of any kind, it came as a total shock to me. Audiogalaxy is the only file-sharing app that's playing ball with the labels and blocking songs when requested. As a result of such filters, all you could find by the most popular artists were remixes, live recordings, or demos--stuff that's generally not for sale anyway. But I must concede that it was easy to obtain many copyrighted MP3s on Audiogalaxy, ostensibly either because the labels that released the songs hadn't asked the company to bar them or because a file sharer had mislabeled the tunes so that they circumvented the blocks. Conspiracy theories So, what could have spawned the RIAA/Audiogalaxy lawsuit and settlement? Theory one: The RIAA went after Audiogalaxy because the lawsuit would set a precedent that the Napster case never quite did: namely, that file-sharing services are solely responsible for altering their central databases to block copyrighted songs whose owners don't want them traded. The words of RIAA head Hilary Rosen are telling: "This should serve as a wake-up call to the other networks that facilitate unauthorized copying. The responsibility for implementing systems that allow for the authorized use of copyrighted works rests squarely on the shoulders of the peer-to-peer network."The RIAA's settlement with Audiogalaxy calls to mind at least two ghosts of file sharing's past. First, there's the ghost of Napster, which is still hampered by an ongoing lawsuit with the RIAA even as it tries to build a service that will appease the record industry. Second, it recalls the specter of MP3.com's Beam-It service, which streamed music to users who inserted a hard copy of a CD containing those songs into their drives--something I still can't believe that the labels fought.
Why consumers will turn to Gnutella How will consumers react to these developments? At this very moment, ex-Audiogalaxy users are e-mailing friends and asking what service they should switch to. As many former Napster users did, these folks will start moving toward those very decentralized networks that the RIAA has been tolerating out of necessity. Eventually, those users will flee to networks that are even harder to shut down than Gnutella, such as the nascent Freenet network. Theory four, outlined above, is clearly against the labels' best interests, and yet their actions are causing exactly that scenario. Here's what a few Audiogalaxy users had to say. Their names have been changed for their protection, as the maximum penalty for each song that they downloaded is $10,000: MP3 Insider: What was your reaction when you logged on to Audiogalaxy and saw your download queue deleted and every song blocked? Steven Hanley: At first, mild confusion. There had been minor hiccups with Audiogalaxy before but nothing quite like that. I saw that my queue was deleted and pretty quickly found news of the settlement both on the SF-indielist and on MetaFilter. I still haven't seen a mainstream media outlet story on this yet. This is at least as big as the Napster case. After reading more, mostly in the MetaFilter comments, I logged back on to see if everything was indeed blocked. And it was. Jeff Curtis: Audiogalaxy was the best file-sharing program for me as I mainly search for MP3s of rare and out-of-print music. I was disappointed that I hadn't kept up with the trial and made sure I downloaded like crazy last weekend. Romane Totale: I didn't, I heard friends complaining about that happening. Their reactions were sadness and disbelief. Mine was more along the lines of "that's what you get for depending on a company, chump." Really, it was just a matter of time. M: Were you under the impression that Audiogalaxy was more legal than the other file-sharing programs because it blocked songs when asked to by the labels? S.H.: No. Why else would KaZaa go offshore? Audiogalaxy could've kept things going longer, like Napster did, but they chose to settle (God knows why--maybe there's a backroom deal behind their decision), so there's no judicial ruling regarding opt in vs. opt out. J.C.: Not really. Is "more legal" like the difference between Italian gray-market CDs and Japanese bootlegs? R.T.: No. I believe that it was just as legal as the others, but the architecture made it a larger litigation target. Protecting yourself from contributary infringement involves either having total control over your users or no control at all. M: What are you going to use now that Audiogalaxy doesn't work? S.H.: Nothing for the moment. I'm on a Mac, and there's no KaZaa for Mac. I could use one of the Gnutella clients, but Gnutella is very hit or miss and not usually worth the time. J.C.: LimeWire or KaZaaLite, although I hear the latter may be dead, too. Gnutella doesn't have enough of a user base. R.T.: I've always used the same copy of LimeWire that they put out before the ads and spyware. It's a good Gnutella client. I saw Audiogalaxy as inferior because it lacked the versatility of Gnutella. [LimeWire is] one app/protocol that can be used for general file sharing either locally or globally. [It's] great in a pinch on heterogeneous networks when you don't have time to futz with native file-sharing protocols. M: How much would you pay to use Audiogalaxy if it charged a fee? S.H.: Nothing. There's no way they could get a paying user base big enough to develop a library large enough--and thus containing enough lesser-known music--to make it worthwhile for me to use it. Napster was closer to the ideal--there were tons of people on it, therefore, you could find anything. You could browse others' libraries easily, thus finding out about new music [Editor's note: Browsing other users' libraries was actually possible with Audiogalaxy as well]; and, with a single click, [you could] set up multiple downloads. Audiogalaxy's main handicap was its limiting Web interface. Still, the range of what you could find was simply astonishing, and this range is only possible if you have tons of users. Maybe one day, if file-sharing charges were integrated into ISP fees, a pay structure would work. But that's a long way off, and until then, it's absurd to expect people to pay for something that won't offer the range of the free services they've already experienced. J.C.: The question is almost meaningless. Where would the money go and what would it get me? R.T.: I typically only use P2P MP3 trading to get a song I'm trying to learn to play. So maybe [I'd pay for] one song per month. To build my MP3 collection, I've mostly used artists' Web sites, authorized third parties such as Epitonic.com, tiny telephone and review sites, and my personal CD library. So Audiogalaxy offers no feature for me that would be worth paying money for. Are you looking for an Audiogalaxy alternative? Keep an eye out next week for our "File-sharing smackdown" feature on CNET Electronics.
* Note: It's not quite accurate that the copyright was all mine. I used unauthorized samples, from Mark E. Smith's spoken-word album, in one of the songs. (Smith is the strange brain behind my favorite band, The Fall.) I'd posted that song on MP3.com years ago, and it subsequently entered Audiogalaxy's search results once other users put it in their shared directories. At that point, the song had already been pulled from MP3.com--but not Audiogalaxy--due to the use of those unauthorized samples.
Senior Editor Eliot Van Buskirk covers portable audio and music-related issues for CNET Reviews. Have a question for him? Let him know!    CARP decision is in!The Librarian of Congress set the Webcasting fees yesterday, accepting some CARP recommendations but rejecting the one that would have forced Webcasters to pay twice what AM/FM channels pay per song. I'm not completely sure how Webcasters will take this news, but I imagine that they must be somewhat relieved. Librarian of Congress's Webcasting determination MP3 Insider on the CARP recommendation EFF's choose-your-own-adventure game The Electronic Frontier Foundation has created a nifty little Flash-based video game in which you try to help a character "get music without losing her privacy and fair-use rights." Carabella, Episode 1: The Quest for Tunes TuneBlock parodyThe Brunching Shuttlecocks posted an imaginary antipiracy tool that the record industry should try. TuneBlock  Bumpy Napster buyoutBertelsmann's acquisition of Napster is not going as smoothly as expected, thanks to a third-party company that claims to own some of Napster's core technology. CNET News.com's story File sharing and CD burnersPeople really like sharing files and burning CDs. Tell us something that we don't know. Ipsos-Reid press release on Mi2N Another Strokes/Aguilera bootleg remix It's not as good as the first one, in my opinion, but this bootleg is still pretty hilarious. Genies.mp3 MP3 Insider on bootleg remixes
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