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eDonkey Pays the Recording Industry $30M
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Sep 12, 2006 03:11 PM
from the sound-of-falling-dominos dept.
from the sound-of-falling-dominos dept.
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?
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eDonkey Pays the Recording Industry $30M
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recording industry? (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://barrett.9hells.org/ | Last Journal: Friday October 06 2006, @09:25PM)
Go away. Please.
Re:recording industry? (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.monkeyengines.co.uk/)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
You misspelled shallow.
Re:recording industry? (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://xybapodcast.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday December 08 2006, @10:06AM)
Re:recording industry? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Good thing (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Monday April 03 2006, @07:23PM)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://ofteninspired.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday April 01 2007, @05:49PM)
The media congloms win lots of battles while losing the war.
Re:Morte d' Robertson (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://keleus.freeshell.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday October 28, @02:17PM)
But that's almost as impractical as SCO's lawsuit(s)
time to cash out (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.atomjax.com/)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
Get this... (Score:5, Funny)
Never ending gravy train (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.redorbit.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday October 07, @03:44AM)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
eDonkey is still around? (Score:1)
E-mule is deffinately more pevelant, even if people do not realize it.Doesn't Limewire use eMule client as its backbone?
Ducking Fisgusting. (Score:2, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Friday March 26 2004, @02:46PM)
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?
I wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday May 08 2006, @10:06AM)
I have a question.... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Re:I have a question.... (Score:5, Interesting)
"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 $25K a year? Because my friend paid artists, paid employees, and paid for the production of the music.
Logged IP? (Score:3, Insightful)
"You are not anonymous when you illegally download copyrighted material. Your IP address is xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx and has been logged."
Great, I only go to the site, they chastise me for 'stealing' music and then write down my IP address. How long until the RIAA sends me a letter regarding my visit to eDonkey.com and requests to view my harddrive to find 'stolen' files?
Let's not forget aMule... (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.basilisk-digital.ch/)
Calling it Quits? (Score:1)
Slashdot is all for copyright protection, right? (Score:1, Interesting)
What do you think they'll do next, seeing that going after the clients and servers can only yield so much? Perhaps ask the government to join in on the "War on Piracy", and target the infrastructure? Personally I don't see my government being very interested in media piracy, but the US government sure is.
Where does all this money come from? (Score:3, Interesting)
FUD! (Score:5, Funny)
I went there JUST so they would log my IP address. There! Sue me RIAA. I visited a public website. Boo friggin hoo..
Next they'll be sending secret police to my house to @(*$fiu$#(NO CARRIER)
cool! (Score:5, Funny)
(http://rocksirens.com/)
Why are they hitting these guys? (Score:1)
Pay the RIAA? Are you kidding me? (Score:2)
(http://www.shezphoto.com/)
Gnapster vs. OpenNap all over again. (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.waskiewicz.org/)
Let them keep attacking, because we will always have someone out there out-innovating the money-hungry RIAA and MPAA.
summary: (Score:2)
(http://portal2portal.com/ | Last Journal: Monday June 04, @08:46PM)
A low blow in the "War on Piracy" (Score:1)
(http://www.polymatchmaker.com/)
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! (Score:2)
(http://www.mjoelkbar.net/ | Last Journal: Wednesday April 20 2005, @09:29AM)
IP logging? (Score:2)
(http://slashdot.org/~nurb432/ | Last Journal: Friday August 27 2004, @03:24PM)
What "matter"? (Score:1)
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... (Score:3, Interesting)
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! (Score:1)
(http://www.kunxi.org/)
thanks for the reminder, RIAA (Score:2, Funny)
How much it matter? (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Monday February 13 2006, @07:11PM)
Just a teeny little bit?
Viewing a webpage is not a copyright infrightment (Score:2, Informative)
(http://earthquakes.jonfr.com/)
------
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 (Score:2)
(http://www.petedavis.net/)
Welcome your new Robber Overlords - the RIAA (Score:2)
(http://www.webgeekworld.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday April 27 2006, @07:47AM)
- 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! (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Monday August 23 2004, @03:25PM)
Owned by NAT. (Score:1)
(http://12.183.160.165/~ccfreak2k/index.html | Last Journal: Tuesday October 03 2006, @12:11PM)
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? (Score:2, Informative)
Other clients and networks (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Wednesday December 01 2004, @10:15PM)
Please suggest other clients and/or networks for Windows, Linux/BSD and Mac
bad precedent (Score:1)
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=h
They agreed to pay? But will they pay? Horseshit! (Score:4, Funny)
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. (Score:2)
(http://www.leperkhanz.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday October 01 2003, @05:17AM)
Anybody you know wishing to find a new p2p app I can recommend it highly, though I still use utorrent for torrents.
rhY