Madster: Can't Stop File-sharing

Folk wisdom has it that fools lock the barn door after the horses have escaped. They also chase all over the countryside trying to catch them. The music business is doing some of both in legal action brought against file-sharing service Madster.

Formerly known as Aimster, the service is one of many that rose in the wake of Napster, the grass-roots phenomenon that blind-sided the music industry back in 1999. Although effectively neutered by protracted and very expensive litigation, Napster explored territory now populated by dozens of less well-known, but perhaps even more threatening imitators.

Madster, for one. Like Gnutella, its file-sharing software resides on its users' computers, not on a central server. That makes it extremely difficult to shut down, as Madster president John A. Deep tried to explain to Judge Marvin E. Aspen in a US District court in Chicago, where he is a defendant in a copyright infringement case brought against him and his operations by the music industry.

On October 29, Judge Aspen issued an injunction against Madster, ordering it to prevent its users from sharing unauthorized copies of music and movies. Deep agreed to comply, but explained that the behavior of individuals using his software was beyond his control.

"The Madster software is out there and I can't take it back," Deep told the judge. He offered to release a copyright-recognition program called "FairPlay" that users could install to restrict the use of copyrighted material. Whether they do so or not is up to them, he said. Deep is in bankruptcy proceedings, ostensibly to dodge damages likely to be levied against him in the current copyright case.

The near-impossibility of controlling individual members of a file-sharing network has proven to be an ongoing nightmare for the music industry, and one that causes lost sleep for the film industry as it faces what it perceives as the impending threat of widespread use of DVD burners and broadband Internet hookups.

No one who has ventured into a large computer store in recent months could have failed to notice the display space allotted to DVD burner hardware and video-editing software. A movie-industry Napster may be the next copyright storm lurking over the horizon. In fact, "a small company called 321 Studios says it soon plans to roll out software that will allow consumers to copy movie DVDs onto blank DVDs," according to a recent report by Anna Wilde Matthews in the Wall Street Journal. Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) president Jack Valenti is valiantly fighting the development to prevent his industry from suffering the fate of the music business.

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