shut down its exchange service in order facilitate a resolution of the copyright infringement
litigation and the sale of its assets, which Listen.com had offered to purchase for $5 million in
cash and more than 500,000 shares of stock.^1798
(3) The Aimster/Madster LawsuitsOn April 30, 2001 a company called Aimster, which was operating a file swapping
service very similar to the Scour service, filed suit in federal court in Albany, New York against
various members of the RIAA for a declaratory judgment that it was not secondarily liable for
copyright infringement by users of its service to swap allegedly infringing material. The Aimster
service was based on a peer-to-peer technology, but was different from Napster and Scour in that
files were traded in an encrypted format which Aimster claimed prevented it from having
knowledge of when its users were exchanging files, the identity of persons exchanging files, or
what files were being exchanged through its service.^1799
The Aimster service was based on instant messaging (IM) technology from AOL.
Specifically, Aimster made use of AOL IM’s “get file” functionality, which gave AOL IM users
the ability to designate certain files or directories on the user’s hard drive that would be made
available for other IM users to copy. The native “get file” functionality in AOL was limited in
two ways. First, a user could retrieve files only from a list of his or her known “buddies” who
were logged on at the same time. Second, there was no capability to search the files that were
available from a buddy; the user was required to know the particular file that was being sought
on the buddy’s hard drive before that file could be fetched.^1800
The Aimster service considerably expanded upon the basic file transferring capability of
the AOL IM system by designating every Aimster user as the buddy of every other Aimster user,
thereby allowing all Aimster users to communicate and share files with any other Aimster user
currently online. The Aimster service also afforded its users the capability to search all the files
contained on the hard drives of other users that had been designated for sharing.^1801 Once the
search for a suitable file was complete, an Aimster user needed only to click on the file name
title and then click on a “Download” button to obtain a copy of the song. The Aimster system
then facilitated the connection of its two users though a private, encrypted network so the file
could be transferred. During the copying of a file, the Aimster system provided a constant
update about the status of each download or upload.^1802
(^1798) Steven Musil, “Scour to End File-Swapping Service” (Nov. 14, 2000), available as of Dec. 16, 2000 at
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-3689821.html.
(^1799) In re Aimster Copyright Litigation, 252 F. Supp. 2d 634, 641 (N.D. Ill. 2002).
(^1800) Id. at 640.
(^1801) Id. at 642. The parties hotly disputed whether Aimster catalogued all available files for download in a single,
centralized database, akin to the Napster system. In issuing its preliminary injunction, the court noted that its
legal analysis of the copyright issues would hold regardless of whether or not Aimster maintained a central
database of files available for transfer. Id. at 641 n.6.
(^1802) Id. at 642-43