The RIAA may have dropped the hammer on Muxtape Inc. in its seemingly endless game of free music whack-a-mole, but with the appearance of open-source alternative OpenTape, the trade association may soon have a larger problem on its hands. OpenTape strongly resembles its freshly shuttered predecessor, and even acknowledges that a piece of its code was "directly lifted from Muxtape," except that it allows users to host their own Muxtape-like playlists on their own servers. This means that OpenTape's users will have to be shut down on an individual basis, as opposed to simply forcing Muxtape to pull the plug (OpenTape swears it's "not affiliated with Muxtape").
Since infringing business models have often proved to be the hardiest, I wonder whether the RIAA would rather have dealt with Muxtape as a partner and potential revenue source for content owners, as opposed to silencing it and alienating fans to the point where the programming community creates a self-service alternative. It's possible that the RIAA and Muxtape were, or are, negotiating; the startup's attitude toward content owners may be the biggest deciding factor of all.
Project Playlist Inc., a not-dissimilar company allowing users to create playlists from songs found elsewhere on the Web (rather than uploaded by the user, as Muxtape does), currently faces a lawsuit from two record labels. I've heard that Project Playlist's hostile response to the labels was as much a factor in their complaint as its original infringement.
Muxtape didn't seem to take itself all that seriously, with brash and brief terms of service (paraphrased: "If you upload an MP3 here, you're letting us do whatever we want with it"). Whether it ever intended to be a real business or not, it may have spawned another host of problems for the RIAA through its deliberate infringement. - Paul Bonanos
See April 29 post from Tech Confidential regarding Project Playlist lawsuit
See Aug. 19 post from Tech Confidential concerning Muxtape's shutdown
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