Lock Up Your Content

Baldwin Louie — Mon, 11 Dec 2000 14:00:00 -0800

Late this summer, Johnny Deep, a 43-year-old small-time e-publishing consultant from the outskirts of Albany, N.Y., launched the beta version of Aimster, a service that enabled America Online (dossier) Instant Messenger (AIM) users to search their buddies' hard drives for MP3 music files.

Put another way, this meant that when AIM user Melissa, to pick a name, sent an instant e-mail message to her best friend in the whole world, Ashley, about the sparkly wonders of the new Britney Spears single, Ashley could do more than IM her back in happy-faced agreement: She could reach through the Net and huff Melissa's copy of "Oops! I Did It Again" straight off her hard drive.

What Aimster has done is allow AIM users like Melissa and Ashley to set up their own "distributed index" file-swapping networks. The big tech difference between this approach and that of much-publicized Napster is that these smaller, more clandestine Internet jukeboxes are virtually untraceable by entertainment-industry enforcers, because the index of files resides only on the hard drives of the IM buddy-group members. "As far as I know," says Deep, at least a little disingenuously, "my users are sharing homework assignments."

Not likely. For AIM junkies, Deep's service quickly became the favorite new fix. Within two days of Aimster's Aug. 9 launch, 10,000 of a potential 65 million AIM subscribers had downloaded the program. Six weeks later, the number spiked to 1.5 million, according to Deep. Then Aimster released a second version that was compatible with the AOL (dossier)-owned IM service ICQ, adding 73 million more potential users to his service.

At his cluttered, 800-square-foot office in the incubator unit at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., Deep was paying the price for popularity. The deluge had overwhelmed Aimster's servers. While Deep typed an apology on www.aimster.com, his team of 15 young-dude programmers worked desperately to keep the site from browning out.

Thanks to his application's sudden renown, Deep has been logging 5,000 PCS minutes a month - enough to worry his wife about brain cancer. He has fielded calls from Intel (dossier), Yahoo (YHOO), AOL and Capitol Records, among others, each of which held out the prospect of a possible deal. "The great thing about Aimster," says Eric Scheirer, a Forrester Research (FORR) analyst who follows peer-to-peer file sharing, "is that it integrates a community, which is particularly important among music fans. Teenagers form whole social circles around their IM buddy lists. The idea that a bunch of friends can listen to music and chat about it at the same time is very compelling."

But the anti-piracy lookouts of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) have also spotted Deep's file-sharing shingle. They are prepared to take action against him to protect their members' intellectual property. Those courting Deep and those who may take him to court both recognize that by marrying instant messaging (with a total of 140 million users) and file sharing (which, via Napster alone, has 38 million), Deep has potentially created an Internet super-app as obvious as the company's name: AIM plus Napster equals Aimster.

No Egghead Required

Even before Al Gore hogged credit for think-tanking the Web into being, peer-to-peer file sharing has back-and-forthed data around the world, but nothing about it excited the public until Shawn Fanning began using it to transfer MP3 files from one music fiend's PC to another in 1999.

The problem for Fanning has been that Napster's central index provides the RIAA with its legal bull's eye. Two newer technologies, however, Gnutella and Freenet, rely on "distributed indexes" that reside on users' hard disks and lack a Napster-like point of vulnerability from which they can be stopped. Gnutella and Freenet would scare the bejesus out of the music industry - except you need to be a virtual MIT egghead to work them.

But now comes Aimster, which has neither the vulnerability issues of Napster nor the unwieldiness of Gnutella. The program, like so much revolutionizing digital entertainment, was born out of equal parts boredom and curiosity. Over Christmas in 1999, Deep was stuck in his leased office on the lifeless RPI campus. The usual pickings on the RPI ethernet - MP3s, games, girlie pics - had grown depressingly slim now that the students had taken their laptops home for the holidays. Deep and one of his programmers wondered if there was a way to simulate the college network without the presence of all those PCs. They realized that many of the kids were still linked by their Instant Messengers. If there was a way to share files via buddy lists, Deep reckoned, he could recreate, in miniature, the school's computer network. The Aimster concept was born.

Before long, Deep knew he was on to something, but wasn't sure where it led. Then, late last July, a business friend razzed Deep about Napster's success and wondered why Deep wasn't as famous as a certain 19-year-old. That's when Deep decided that his program would distribute music and other content, Napster-like, to AIM users.

Sixty obsessive, sleep-deprived days later, Deep had released two versions of Aimster. Kick-starting the program into life after it is first installed from aimster.com can be more than a little frustrating. But once going, it operates like a rudimentary search engine, poking its way through your buddies' hard drives, provided that they, too, use Aimster. Type in a request, and Aimster returns a matching list of files, which can be music, video, graphic, text or anything else. Double-clicking a file name establishes a peer-to-peer connection and begins the transfer.

By limiting its file sharing to buddy lists, Aimster has carved out a possible - repeat, possible - middle ground in the war between the entertainment industries and the technology adepts. Frank Creighton, the RIAA's senior vice president and director of anti-piracy, says that while Aimster "isn't less harmful or wrong" than using Napster, he allows that "it is more akin to the days when kids would make compilation tapes and trade them with dorm buddies. It's more like a Phish fan saying, 'I made you this tape. Now I want you to go out and buy the album.'"

Kid Aimster

Already, one major record label has given Aimster a whirl. As part of the promotion for the release of Radiohead's fourth album, Kid A, EMI Group (EMI)'s Capitol Records released to Aimster users not songs but Radiohead-branded "skins," which customized Aimster's look and linked to a Radiohead site. Though Deep can claim only a small role in the album's success, the label's tacit endorsement helped put Aimster on the map.

Deep hopes to turn that goodwill into revenue in a number of ways. One ingenious twist on Aimster's attachment to IM is that it piggybacks onto the Web's "stickiest" application - Instant Messaging is constantly open on users' desktops. Part of Aimster's moneymaking potential, therefore, is in acting like a Trojan horse for marketers, spilling ads and promotional opportunities into its window on users' desktops. "There's a lot of potential for ad support for something that's always on," says Scheirer.

Because of this, says Deep, "one of the country's largest music retailers" is looking at taking an equity stake in Aimster. (Sources say the retailer is the giant music chain Trans World Entertainment (TWMC), whose corporate headquarters are a stone's throw from Deep's.) If things go as planned, Deep would develop a plug-in that would turn his service into a rudimentary superdistributor: the retailer would fire promotional messages for various artists to Aimster users, along with embedded links to its online CD store. Aimsterites would then pass along those e-flyers to their buddies and spread the retailer's pitch all over the network. "Viral marketing can be good for music," says Jim Griffin, noted digital-music fortune teller and CEO of Cherry Lane Digital. "It's a lot like radio: It allows people to hear music before they buy it."

But before Deep can stop sweating the payments on his BMW 528i, he faces a mess of challenges. Bringing big-bang ideas to market costs big, and as yet, Deep has no real financial backing. Potential investors, Deep noted in October, are "kind of paranoid until the Napster ruling comes out." He has kept Aimster afloat on his own limited cash, supplemented by loans from wealthy friends. By the time this story is printed, the still technically rickety service could well have crashed.

Moreover, Deep could get derailed any number of ways. Why, for instance, would AOL, zealously protective of its proprietary IM services, allow Aimster to leech on to its software? The answer may be that swapped files are not transmitted via AOL servers - Aimster uses AIM and ICQ only to detect buddies. "Therefore, AOL can only stop Aimster by rewriting the AIM and ICQ software it distributes to users or by kicking Aimster users off of its service," says Eytan Adar, a peer-to-peer researcher at Xerox (XRX)'s Palo Alto Research Center. These scenarios, say sources close to AOL, are possible but unlikely.

AOL, though, might sharpen its swords when Deep releases a potent new version of Aimster, due out this month. Among other improvements, it will allow AIM users to communicate with, at first, ICQ users, and later, with users from Yahoo and MSN.

Assuming it works the way Deep says it can, interoperability among different IM systems would be groundbreaking. AOL has aggressively fought off any attempts to connect AIM users with others, especially rival MSN, citing security concerns. Through an effort known as IMUnified, the Yahoo and MSN messenger services plan to be interoperable with each other by the end of 2000. "But though we would welcome them, AOL is not part of IMUnified," says Yahoo Messenger's senior producer Brian Park. Deep's interoperability trick is switching technology: Instead of trying to connect two incompatible services, AIM users with messages bound for or coming from other IM services will be routed through Aimster's own servers. "You get to IM your buddies from any service," says Deep. "That's a cool thing."

This added popularity will only exacerbate the problems the music industry may have with other plug-ins that Deep says public-domain programmers are developing for Aimster 3.0. These plug-ins will enable both widespread music and video file sharing. Like Gnutella and Freenet, they will have a distributed index, and they will be as easy to use as Aimster, but they will not be restricted to the smaller instant-messenger buddy groups. That is, they'll allow the same widespread sharing as Napster without the vulnerable central index. "This is history in the making," says Deep.

Lightning Fast

The big question is whether it will be a milestone in the history of digital entertainment, or a legal footnote. Ted Cohen, EMI's vice president of new media, says he originally partnered with Aimster because he felt that Deep was willing to work on legal models of music distribution. But despite Capitol's toe dip, the major record groups are not about to condone the service. "We're not risking musical assets," says Cohen. "Without security measures or something that monetizes the sharing, it doesn't return revenue to the artists and labels commensurate with putting it out there." Another major-label executive is more blunt on the subject of p-to-p technologies: "We won't work with people who are inherently criminal."

In the wake of the Napster litigation, the Johnny Deeps of the world hope to design services impervious to the entertainment industry's legal arguments. Deep contends that his Version 3.0 plug-in architecture will help Aimster differentiate itself from Napster, because Aimster would then facilitate everything from instant messaging to, possibly, a music retailer's marketing campaigns. According to Deep, Aimster clearly has non-copyright-infringing uses, and he can't help it if public-domain programmers release plug-ins that allow the promiscuous swapping of copyrighted files.

Legal experts cautiously concur. "I think the Aimster technology has substantial noninfringing uses," says Julie Cohen, an associate professor of Internet copyright law at the Georgetown University (dossier) Law Center. Mark Radcliffe, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based copyright attorney, views Aimster's chances in a post-Napster universe a little more conservatively. "I could foresee a situation where the court rules against Napster but the judgment is written in such a way that it doesn't affect technologies such as Aimster. But I'm guessing the chances aren't better than 40 percent," he says.

Potential music-industry pariah though Deep may be, music executives can console themselves with the fact that he is also a businessman with a wife, four daughters and payments on a Beemer. Thus, he's anxiously seeking ways to wrest cash from his new venture - not just to spend millions on a Napster-style legal fight. "When you've been an entrepreneur," says Deep, "you can tell when you're going to run out of money, just like you can tell you're going to fall off your bike." In the lightning-fast annals of online music- and file-sharing, this may well be Aimster's moment, and Johnny Deep is pedaling as fast as he can.

Colin Beavan writes for Inside.com. Warren Cohen contributed to this article.

The Industry Standard - Lock Up Your Content - Comments

Lock Up Your Content