The Null Device

AudioGalaxy from the inside

A former employee of late lamented MP3-sharing application AudioGalaxy spills the beans on how it worked, and the lengths they went to to prevent copyright infringement (despite the RIAA's disingenuous protestations that they didn't try). (via Found)

There are 2 comments on "AudioGalaxy from the inside":

Posted by: Steve Tue Jul 9 02:09:25 2002

Nice article, and surely miss AudioGalaxy, but I really am sick of articles (most of them on Boing Boing) about how file sharing apps are not an enemy of copyrighted material because people were sharing non-copyrighted material anyway, and besides, they were buying more CDs now because of all the great bands they'd discovered.

Yeah. My ass they are.

Allow me to be the first one to say it: I used AudioGalaxy (and Napster, and LimeWire, and WinMX) to make personal copies of copyrighted material I hadn't bought, and it didn't increase my CD buying activities - it decreased it to zero. Let's not try to kid ourselves.

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org Tue Jul 9 17:27:47 2002

That's your experience. I've bought at least two CDs in the past few months after downloading them in their entirety. If I like an album, I want to have it on CD.

And how many of the CDs you downloaded would you have bought in the first place had you not found them online? A minority of them, I bet.

In any case, there are studies which suggest strongly that lost sales through MP3 sharing are outweighed by people discovering and buying new music through MP3 sharing. Not everybody is a criminal at heart, despite what Hillary Rosen wants us to think. (Now why in the world would recording industry types think that people are by their nature unscrupulous thieving scum? Could it be projection?)