Seems like there is no learning in the music industry. What happens when you kill a centralized service that might not have all the right licenses, but at least an address and presumably someone willing to do business (think Napster)? Well, a decentralized service appears with no address and no business model (think Bittorrent, the protocol, not the company).
So, here we are again. Ars Technica writes:
The RIAA's unending game of cat-and-mouse with unlicensed music distribution sites has taken an abrupt turn with the introduction of Opentape, a purportedly unrelated open-source clone of Muxtape that the RIAA got shut down last week. Opentape's appearance demonstrates that the RIAA has opened a much larger can of worms than it may have expected when it convinced Muxtape's owners to take the site offline.....
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.
