Splicetoday

Digital
Aug 27, 2008, 08:56AM

RIAA Stirs Up Digital Insurgency

The Internet's got a funny way of getting even with big media conglomerates. Muxtape, a site set up so that users could share mixes with each other through streaming media (meaning the songs weren't available for download), recently became a target for the RIAA. So, true to form, they threatened the website with legal oblivion and shut it down. Only now the exact same software has reemerged in a peer-to-peer form, meaning that the software they tried to shut down is now both harder to trace and easier to steal music from.

Muxtape debuted in April this year as a revitalization of the mixtape from days gone by. Instead of fumbling with analog tapes that can be shared only with a single friend, Muxtape allowed users to upload playlists of MP3s and share a streaming version of their musical tastes with the world (outside of some clever hackery, listeners couldn't download the tracks). Muxtape's simple website allowed listeners to stream a playlist's tracks and offered links to commercial stores like Amazon to purchase legitimate copies.

Muxtape's biggest problem is that it hadn't licensed any of the rights it needed to store and stream all the copyrighted works it was hosting, leading to the RIAA's pulling the plug on Muxtape last week.

Whether Opentape truly has anything to do with Muxtape, the RIAA now has a whole new set of headaches. By striking down a centralized, streaming-only music discovery service like Muxtape, the RIAA has apparently inspired the release of a simple, decentralized software package for easily streaming and sharing music from any host and URL across the globe, with nary an affiliate link for a legitimate music shop in sight.

Oops.

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