Myspace Threaten Action Against 'legal' Download Service

Lawyers acting on behalf of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp are threatening to prosecute and sue a mentally ill man in the United Kingdom over a software application he wrote which, he claims, legally downloads music tracks from the News Corp owned MySpace website.

The little known application called Clickster, which was released by its author, Robert Palmer as Freeware, enables its users to easily download any music track on MySpace. In response, News Corp's, Washington based lawyers, have accused Mr Palmer of hacking and causing harm to MySpace, while threatening both criminal and civil prosecution to Mr. Palmer. "This is a crazy situation." said a stunned Mr Palmer.

"MySpace employ no security what-so-ever to prevent the downloading of some 110 million mp3 files hosted on their website." explained Mr Palmer. "The thing is, if you put files onto an unprotected server, you shouldn't be too surprised when people start downloading them. MySpace don't even make the procedure difficult, infact it is so easy that, users can do this themselves without any need for software like mine or server-side scripts." claimed Mr. Palmer."

"Instead of implementing some form of security to protect the music files they host on behalf of bands, News Corp prefers to use lawyers to cover-up the miserable failings of their own programmers. You would think a company the size of News Corp would be employing the same level of security as seen on the iTunes site, but no,
there isn't even a sniff of security on MySpace and 110 million mp3 files are available for download to whoever wants them.

"This failing of MySpace should be of particular concern to the bands and record labels who entrust their music files to MySpace." stated Mr Palmer.

Mr Palmer, who lives with Bipolar Disorder (AKA Manic Depression) and who develops software for a hobby, claims to have written Clickster in under four hours, during what he calls a "a particularly good manic phase" of his illness.

"There is nothing illegal about the operation of Clickster and I totally refute and deny News Corp's allegations about me and my software. Unfortunately, I can't afford specialist lawyers, especially lawyers of the quality that News Corp has unleashed on me. Their tone is aggressive and very threatening, but I don't intend to be bullied and intimidated by these people, even though this is all a bit scary." said Mr Palmer.

Given the shear volume of music videos, movies and tv shows available on MySpace TV, which Mr Palmer claims is being distributed by MySpace in violation of copyright, he commented. "There is a certain hypocrisy to MySpace trying to claim any moral high-ground, when they are one the biggest purveyors of material which violates copyright in the world."

"Those who should be facing prosecution here, are News Corp themselves. They have placed over 110 million mp3 files onto openly available webservers, with no security what-so-ever to prevent anyone, anywhere in the world,
from downloading them. This is clear negligence on their part, if I did the same thing with my personal music collection, the record industry would, quite rightly, be on to me, in a flash." concluded, Mr Palmer.

To see how easy it is to download mp3's from MySpace...

1. Copy the band's numerical ID from their MySpace page.(This can be found within most links on their MySpace page)

2. Add the Numerical ID to the end of this URL...
http://mediaservices.myspace.com/services/media/musicplayerxml.ashx?b=[PUT BAND ID HERE]

3. Put the above URL into any web-browser and the bands' XML Playlist will be displayed which contains the addresses to all their MP3's.

eg. http://cache04-music02.myspacecdn.com/31/std_22524e515008a191b347b8ca2e4bc2ce.mp3

Clickster is available a Freeware from...
www.remlapsoftware.com