eDonkey Pays the Recording Industry $30M

ColinPL writes, "MetaMachine Inc., the firm behind online file-sharing software eDonkey, has agreed to pay $30 million to avoid potential copyright infringement lawsuits from the recording industry. The company also agreed to take measures to prevent file sharing by people using previously downloaded versions of the eDonkey software. The eDonkey application now displays the message, 'The eDonkey2000 Network is no longer available. Please see eDonkey.com for more details.' After that message is displayed the uninstaller is launched automatically." If you visit edonkey.com, it logs your IP address. How much will the demise of eDonkey matter, given that most who access that P2P network do so using the open-source eMule?

recording industry?

The so called "recording industry" is just not needed anymore. Just get your fortune and invest in another productive area, and get over it.

Go away. Please.

Re:recording industry?

also, most artists have no experience marketing, selling, or dealing with the right people that will get them the high-paying gigs they need to continue performing and feed their family and or make the rent.

Yep, presumably artists will still need outside help to help them finance, organise and arrange large live gigs. However, I think there's less of a need for recording companies to market and distribute music from artists. Distributing music via the Internet is obviously cheap enough not to need financial backing; I need hardly go into the details of that on Slashdot. But marketing music is also a industry I expect to decline in the next few years. Music is an odd thing, in that one cannot 'sell' a piece of music in the same way one would sell a car. The customer either likes the piece of music he hears, or he does not. No amount of salesmanship will get him to change his mind, as it boils down to personal preference.

Because of this, marketing music consists largely of getting people to listen to it. Unfortunately, people have limited time on their hands, and cannot listen to every piece of music, so recording companies market selectively, using bands they know have a wide appeal. It's a broad, scattergun approach, and I can't help but think that one could do a far better job with a large database and some social networking software.

Re:recording industry?

Music is an odd thing, in that one cannot 'sell' a piece of music in the same way one would sell a car. The customer either likes the piece of music he hears, or he does not. No amount of salesmanship will get him to change his mind, as it boils down to personal preference.

I disagree with this fundamentally. A lot of people, especially young people, buy music for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the actual music but have more to do with a certain image or subculture. I grew up listening to punk, and while some of it actually does qualify as good music, much of it is less about the content and more about expressing an opinion on the culture (Kind of like /. ;-) Rap/Hip-hop music too is often about an image - the clothes, the cars, the attitude, etc. - and not about the quality of the music. All of these things are expressed outside of the music as well. e.g. by the artists appearances, actions, and speech on radio/television, live concerts, etc. This "artistic image" is a kind of marketing and has always been exploited and/or manipulated by the recording industry. In this regard, there is quite a bit of salesmanship in the industry, and the artists are to a large degree dependent on the industry to get that image out via appearances in other media.

Re:recording industry?

A lot of people, especially young people, buy music for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the actual music...

You misspelled shallow. :)

Re:recording industry?

I don't know if they should go away, but for crying out loud adapt to the Internet. This is the new format. They all need to work together and remarket their products. They still expect people to buy their CD's by the billions as if CD's are still new technology. They still think they can put out 1-2 songs and then throw in 8 other songs to fill up a disc. The market is changing, so they need to change with it.

Re:recording industry?

Their tactics could use some updating certainly, but there's a lot of money to be made in creating the next big star. Recorded music is still a commodity, and what drives the price up of concert tickets? A: Who is most famous. How do they get famous? A: Recording industry promotes them.

What would happen without the recording industry? A: They'd become popular by internet vote and word-of-mouth, someone would claim to have "made them famous" on their website and demand some of their earnings from concerts, videos, commercials. Other people would hop on that bandwagon, realize it's easier to promote people if they work together, and they'd call it the WMIA, World Music Industry Association, claiming rights throughout the world as an "international" (ie internet-based) company.

You'd think the way people talk that big industries are just a bunch of small people being greedy. Well, you'd be right.

Good thing

Good thing they paid up. Uncle RIAA thought it would be a shame if "something should happen to their nice office building".

Re:Good thing

Good thing they paid up. Uncle RIAA thought it would be a shame if "something should happen to their nice office building".

For some reason you got modded down, but really, I have to wonder about the legality of this...

"eDonkey, has agreed to pay $30 million to avoid potential copyright infringement lawsuits from the recording industry". Not damages awarded by a court, not even to settle a pending suit - To avoid a potential lawsuit!

If that doesn't meet the textbook definition of extortion, I don't know what would.

Morte d' Robertson

Slowly the vise closes in on all P2P... yet filesharing grows year by year...
The media congloms win lots of battles while losing the war.

Re:Morte d' Robertson

They call that a war of attrition. And they are indeed loosing (big lawsuits against few people wont work, they need small lawsuits against teeming crowds).

But that's almost as impractical as SCO's lawsuit(s)

time to cash out

MetaMachine Inc., the firm behind online file-sharing software eDonkey, has agreed to pay $30 million to avoid potential copyright infringement lawsuits from the recording industry.

Sounds like they've made their fortune, and have made the decision to pay the piper and cash out. I have no doubt that MetaMachine's profits were far in excess of $30 million.

It logs your IP address.

If you visit edonkey.com, it logs your IP address

If you visit one my my sites, I'll log your IP address too. So what - are they following up on each one to see if they are potential pirates?

Get this...

It also logs the page you requested, when you requested it, and your browser. Everyday, they also rotate their logs and compress them for further statistical tracking at a future point!

Never ending gravy train

So, eDonkey wants to stay legit, good on them.
They want to put in place controls to limit copying, good on them.
They then give all their money to the bullys, bad move.
Paying of the artists might seem like a prudent course of action, but once you pay of one group, what about the next?

Theres the RIAA, MPAA and the BSA.
The guitar tab people and the knitting pattern folks and all the other American groups.
Thats not including all the individual software companies who want a piece of the pie, nor does it include all the groups from other countries (like FACT(Federation Against Copyright Theft) or CAAST(Canadian Alliance Against Software Theft)).

What happens when I find software from my company is available on limewire, where do I get my piece of the pie from, or is mine not big enough and is simply enough to get it added to the list of banned searches without any financial payback?

What makes my company different to the RIAA groups?

Let the copyright owners prove blatant infringement, let them show the service is doing illegal things and let the service fix itself.

Don't give into threats.

Re:Never ending gravy train

I agree.
It seems funny I was reading the Sept. 2006 edition of Reader's Digest this morning, and was drawn to an column "Turning Point" featuring Bob Newhart this month and he had something along those lines to say also.
The article is titled "Finding My Funny Bone", by Bob Newhart.

He was talking about two of his recordings : "The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart", and it's sequel, "The Button-Down Mid Strikes Back". The first went to #1 on the Billboard charts, and got between the two recordings, got him three Grammy's that year. He goes on to say that he just recently started getting royalties on the recordings (they came out in 1960), and:
"Lately I have begun to receive royalties on the albums on a quarterly basis. Even as a trained accountant, I'm no exactly sure how they calculate these royalties without all of the financial records and contracts that burned up in The Great Warner's Office Fire of '73. But they apparently have a formula. Just last week, I received a check for $1.18."

it's only natural everybody uses eMule

historically speaking, eMule comes from eDonkey (eStallion) and eHorse (eMare)... Plus is sterile, RIAA likes that

eDonkey is still around?

I thought eDonkey had long since been dead. I have not seen an ed2k link on the net for quite some time. And I had never used eDonkey for downloading music, and it seems most other people didn't either. Seemed like a popular way to pirate movies a few years back before BitTorrent took off, and was used a lot for porno. I was really the only one I know of that used eDonkey at all, and I think I may have downloaded one thing off of it, some like subbed anime or something.

E-mule is deffinately more pevelant, even if people do not realize it.Doesn't Limewire use eMule client as its backbone?

Ducking Fisgusting.

Instead of threats of violence or interference, there's threats of lawsuits to extract cash and force the death of anything that threatens a well-financed-enough organization. Yay. (as /me shakes head)...

It's almost as if the RIAA can now go after any company who sells products with any sort of file-transfer technology... I wonder why they haven't gone after any web browser that supports FTP, or anyone who makes/distributes an NNTP reader? Hell, FTP and NNTP were passing copyrighted files around long before AOL even reared it's head... Ah, but the answer is pretty obvious in thsoe cases, no?

N.B. how much money does a grassroots organization have to scrape together and put in the politicians' pockets before we can get some sort of copyright law reforms, anyway?

/P

I wonder...

So, does the $30 million go to the 'starving' artists or will the RIAA soak up the money?

I have a question....

Where did eDonkey GET $30M to pay RIAA? Or is this a hyped-up announcement of a "settlement" that is never really collected?

Re:I have a question....

"Where did eDonkey GET $30M to pay RIAA? Or is this a hyped-up announcement of a "settlement" that is never really collected?"

From advertising.

Many people mistakenly see the big players in the P2P game as "white knights" because they make it so easy to get so much music for free. But, make no mistake: they are not in it because "information wants to be free." They are not in it to "stick it to the man." They do it to make money. They are in the business of helping people pirate music, and business is goooood.

It's funny that many of us justify our P2P usage by imagining some record executive in a $3,000 suit. The reality is usually different. The only record company owner I've met ran a ten-person label and paid himself $25K a year. Sam and Jed, the folks who brought you eDonkey so countless teens can "stick it to the man," likely made about $25K every week. The executives at Sharman are also multi-millionaires.

So why are Sam and Jed rich, while my friend the indie record label owner could only afford to pay himself $25K a year? Because my friend paid artists, paid employees, and paid for the production of the music.

Logged IP?

Everyone who clicks on the eDonkey link gets this friendly message:

"You are not anonymous when you illegally download copyrighted material. Your IP address is xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx and has been logged."

Great, I only go to the site, they chastise me for 'stealing' music and then write down my IP address. How long until the RIAA sends me a letter regarding my visit to eDonkey.com and requests to view my harddrive to find 'stolen' files?

Let's not forget aMule...

And let's not forget... for Linux, there's the ever-excellent aMule [amule.org] client to access the network.

Calling it Quits?

If Edonkey wanted to call it quits.. Why Bother paying out.. They should have given they lawyers the 30Mil and told em.. Spend it all in court.. Then closed the doors and send everyone home.

Slashdot is all for copyright protection, right?

Okay, they've shut down a firm that was directly hosting and indirectly responsible for massive copytight infringement. Seeing that unauthorised distribution of copyrighted material is illegal in most, if not all, the western world, I think it's good to see the law being enforced. Sadly it's being enforced by corporate lawyers and not governments. Untill now, copyright infringers have been prosecuted, and had lost, to the corporate lawyers. Even so, copyright infringement is steadily on the rise.

What do you think they'll do next, seeing that going after the clients and servers can only yield so much? Perhaps ask the government to join in on the "War on Piracy", and target the infrastructure? Personally I don't see my government being very interested in media piracy, but the US government sure is.

Where does all this money come from?

Where does all this money come from? Weren't they distributing a free program to allow the free swapping of digital files? Where does the $30M show up from?

FUD!

Plain old FUD .. EVERY friggin website in the world logs your IP address. It's only that, an IP address.

I went there JUST so they would log my IP address. There! Sue me RIAA. I visited a public website. Boo friggin hoo..

Next they'll be sending secret police to my house to @(*$fiu$#(NO CARRIER)

cool!

now when I want to know my IP address, I can get a free threatening message with it! awesome.

Why are they hitting these guys?

The P2P people are still at fault? You know I think in a normal place the Industry would be paying the P2P networks to shut down instead of twisting laws to do it.

Pay the RIAA? Are you kidding me?

That's like paying Satan to get off your back. It will only make the problem worse. If I was one of the people who ran eDonkey I would have left the country a long time ago to escape the Recording Industry Mafia known as the RIAA.

Gnapster vs. OpenNap all over again.

When the recording industry forced the Gnapster community offline, they all patted themselves on the back for a job well done. But the opennap network was just spinning up, and was bigger and better than the original. Fast forward a few years ahead, and all these attacks on PnP filesharing has generated beautiful, useful protocols like BitTorrent.

Let them keep attacking, because we will always have someone out there out-innovating the money-hungry RIAA and MPAA.

summary:

The tighter you squeeze the more slips out between your fingers.

A low blow in the "War on Piracy"

It appears that the Recording Industry has taken to biological weapons.

As defined in Wikipedia, "Biological warfare, also known as germ warfare, is the use of any organism (bacteria, virus or other disease-causing organism) or toxin found in nature, as a weapon of war. It is meant to incapacitate or kill an adversary."

Does the colonies of corp lawyers qualify as a bacteria, virus or other disease-causing organism? I think we need to tell the President about this. He'd love to hear that we really did find a weapon of mass destruction.

Ohnoes!

They got my IP!

IP logging?

Is visiting the edonkey site enough to constitute intent to infringe and bring the wrath of the man down on you?

What "matter"?

How will it matter since everyone uses eMule?

It will not.

First, I could never get past a queue on that network. As in, "come back in a week or two, maybe less if others drop off".
I can say I never downloaded anything off ed2k...

Second, there is eMule, as just said.

Third, a network that's older than Kazaa's and had not been sued yet must have sucked more (as in "has been even more inefficient") than Win95.

Fourth, it is a centralized network, which, being used for illegal filesharing and little else, is functionaly equivalent to waving a banner written in letters so big you can read them on Google Earth, saying "SUE ME HERE NOW".

Fifth, Every other p2p app used for illegal filesharing is very, very dead since Bram Cohen released BitTorrent.

Sixth ff. [slashdot.org]

Heh I had no idea...

My guess is that they agreed to a settlement that the RIAA knew the company didn't have the funds to pay. This will force them into a Chapter 7 liquidation under which the RIAA recoups a fraction of the 30 mil, and lines up with other creditors based on their priority in the capital structure of the firm.

The goal of this is probably to prevent the equity shareholders from getting any return on their dime.

I doubt that eDonkey had greater than 30 mil in cash on hand, and I doubt they even had that in total assets. This is based on my knowledge of the workings of other similar P2P developers and of small tech firms in general.

If I am wrong and they have sold hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising and were sitting on a huge nest egg, I'd be very surprised.

Tor, Tor, Tor!

This demostrates the importance of tor and privoxy in the daily life.

thanks for the reminder, RIAA

I haven't turned on my aMule client in months. Downloading now...

How much it matter?

How much will the demise of eDonkey matter, given that most who access that P2P network do so using the open-source eMule?

Just a teeny little bit? :-)

Viewing a webpage is not a copyright infrightment

This is the single most stupid message that I have ever seen. Thease idiots did the right thing, they did die in the hands of a bully.

------
The eDonkey2000 Network is no longer available.

If you steal music or movies, you are breaking the law.

Courts around the world -- including the United States Supreme Court --
have ruled that businesses and individuals can be prosecuted for illegal
downloading.

You are not anonymous when you illegally download copyrighted material.

Your IP address is -removed- and has been logged.

Respect the music, download legally.

Goodbye Everyone.
------
So, RIAA is going to sue all of slashdot ?

What a shame

Really, I never used eDonkey, but I've used eMule quite a bit. It seemed to me that they would have had a strong case against the RIAA. Yes, they would have to worry about the issue of providing tools for pirating, and in the current legal environment, that's pretty dangerous, but the case history has been that if you can show substantial non-infringing uses, then it's not illegal, and let's face it, you can find very substantial examples of non-infringing content on the eDonkey network. That just seems like it would have been a pretty easy case to make. IANAL, however, and their lawyer(s) clearly thought differently. Oh well, everyone hold their breath until the RIAA disappears in a puff of irrelevance. 10 years from now, they'll be a distant memory.

Welcome your new Robber Overlords - the RIAA

Future activities of your new overlords will include, but wont be limited to :

- Extorthion

- Bridge trolling and tolling

- Forcing every household's firstborn male into service

- Claiming each and every newlywed bride for the first night

quick, everyone go to edonkey.com!

Lets give the RIAA a few million IP addresses to pay people to sift through!

Owned by NAT.

If you steal music or movies, you are breaking the law.

Courts around the world -- including the United States Supreme Court -- have ruled that businesses and individuals can be prosecuted for illegal downloading.

You are not anonymous when you illegally download copyrighted material.

Your IP address is 207.62.231.230 and has been logged.

Respect the music, download legally.

Goodbye Everyone.

Gee, that's too bad that I hardly even use my own IP address, let alone the fact that my address changes every 20 hours (even less if my firewall decides to keel over again).

I know it doesn't apply to everyone, but I scoff at this "you are not anonymous" business. The RIAA and all of their cronies can kiss my IP-shifting ass.

Seriously, though, so what if my address is logged. Everyone may have already drawn this conclusion, but the page put up looks like a scare tactic hosted by our friends at the are eye double ay ess ess.

stealing?

from edonkey.com: "If you steal music or movies, you are breaking the law." NO SHIT. Now if only it was possible to actually steal music via the internet.

Other clients and networks

Please suggest other clients and/or networks for Windows, Linux/BSD and Mac

bad precedent

does this mean all P2P companies are going to get sued? Kill the messenger, of course, it's the "easiest" way. Instead of thinking about how to change their business model in light of disruptive technology like P2P, recording/movie studios are pissing off even those who might potentially pay for their products some other way (e.g. flat fee per month).

What would happen if we had a subscription-based, DRM-free service where we could download all the MP3s and movies we wanted for a flat monthly fee, even if that fee may have to be substantially more than let's say 20 per month? Well for one, I would subscribe. The myth that I'm going to pirate the shit out of everything is completely bogus. Most people who earn a living through a job do not have time to pirate music or films nor do they want to. Yes, I may occasionaly burn a copy of a movie or a song and give it to someone I know, but that would be the final extent of such "piracy". If someone who is ethical (and most my friends are) understands the ramifications of piracy, he or she would choose to subscribe to the service too. Why? Because by removing DRM, and allowing unlimited downloads for a flat fee - the RIAA/MPAA says - "we trust you will do the right thing". I know this is absurd to say, but you can't gaun trust out of people by suing them. All that does is generate bad press and more antagonism. Studios have to eat the monetary loss to gain that trust at first (think of it as investing in your future, or changing the consumers' mood), and then expect to reap the benefits of that later down the line.

Universal already figured this out (http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=6&url=ht tp%3A%2F%2Fwww.techdirt.com%2Farticles%2F20060829% 2F0819245.shtml&ei=wUUHRcDSJ4LyYK338N8E&sig=__LLzf axSLA1fYwCwLwRdYHzz-Zso=&sig2=eyOXGhJL0WAGNBWMBNoc uQ) . Alright, well, they'll probably try to plug some ads in there... But there has got to be another model, which has NO DRM, is flat fee, and allows unlimited downloads of movies and/or songs. Well, at least MOVIES, because it takes you 2+ hours to watch a movie, whereas in the same time frame you could hear 2 albums worth of songs, so there's some additional logistics as to how you'd price either one... but the concept's the same - flat fee, no DRM, unlimited downloads OR no flat fee, no DRM and be forced to hear/watch advertisements either directoly prior or directly after the movie/song. A compromise can be made. I just dont know why it hasn't been made yet.

They agreed to pay? But will they pay? Horseshit!

They agreed to pay what $30 million dollars???? I cry horseshit! Nobody who actually has $30 million dollars has ever, does ever, or will ever just agree to give it away to someone. Especially something as legally dubious as an RIAA lawsuit.

    Most likely they agreed to 'pay' some absurd amount of money knowing full well that barely more than a few thousand dollars would ever be passed to the RIAA under any circumstances. They agree to some sum that they would never have (after all they aren't any different from you and me, gentle Slashdaughters) if there was any posssiblity that they would actually have to come up with the cash. I would guess that 'E-Donkey incorporated' owes $3,000,000,000,000,000 dollars for their 'crime', and the people and programmers who actually were eating all the pizza at E-Donkey's parties don't have to pay anything. As long as they agree to 'be good in the future'.

    If the actual people had to pay even 1/1000th of the this absurd amount for their 'crime', then I'll bet that they would be planning serious mayhem on the RIAA lawyers that were personally involved with this bullshit lawsuit.

    Look, I'm against violence and horror as much as the next girl, but, in the real world, when you're up against real assholes like the RIAA, then violence and horror goes a long way to 'equalizing' the legal chessboard. Sooner or later the RIAA is going to figure this out. Probably each lawyer will, individually, as they watch their guts drip out onto the floor of their BMW just after winning another extortion lawsuit for downloading 'Yummy, Yummy, Yummy' against that one wrong person.

    Keep your fingers crossed.

Shareaza.

Just wanted to shamelessly plug shareaza, which is a great FOSS p2p app for windows that most n00bs can find their way around. It does edonkey, gnutella1, gnutella2, and even torrents (though not especially good in the torrent dept.).

Anybody you know wishing to find a new p2p app I can recommend it highly, though I still use utorrent for torrents.

rhY