The lawsuit was filed in federal court in New York by the Recording
Industry of America (RIAA) on behalf of its member labels, and the
National Music Publishers Association, Inc. (NMPA), on behalf of
the music publisher principals of its licensing affiliate, The
Harry Fox Agency, Inc. and their thousands of songwriter partners.
The complaint accuses Audiogalaxy of "willfully and
intentionally" encouraging and facilitating "millions of
individual, anonymous users to copy and distribute infringing
copyrighted works by the millions, if not billions."
The complaint further states that, "With functions such as the
ability to download entire songs and albums, cover artwork, and
software, as well as a peer-to-peer file-sharing function,
Audiogalaxy's system is even more egregious than that of
Napster."
Matt Oppenheim, Senior Vice President, Business and Legal
Affairs of the RIAA, said that the litigation was a last resort
after numerous out-of-court warnings to Audiogalaxy were ignored or
resulted in half-hearted attempts to fix the problem.
"Audiogalaxy and Napster are cut from the same cloth," said
Oppenheim. "Audiogalaxy is profiting by providing its users a
library of pirated music, including today's most popular hits.
Though claiming fealty to copyrights, Audiogalaxy continues to
offer up virtually all of the music we told them should be
excluded. The firm's sieve-like filter has been totally
ineffective."
Like Napster’s original model, Audiogalaxy appears to operate on
a centralised structure, meaning that users must access the
Audiogalaxy server to identify what tracks are available from other
users. This gives the site an ability to control the network’s use,
which is not possible in a decentralised model. The decentralised
approach is taken by Audiogalaxy’s bigger rival, KaZaA.
