Music P2P goes legit

Found on Ars Technica on Monday, 24 October 2005
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From a distance, iMesh looks like another subscription service à la Yahoo Music. You pay your US$6.99 per month and are able to access all the legal music on the iMesh network. Like the other subscription services, the music is tied to the PC on which iMesh is installed. Unlike NapsterToGo and Yahoo Music, there's no option to copy the music to your digital music player; a future update will include that functionality. Naturally, if you want to keep the music, you still have to buy it.

iMesh will still search Gnutella and other P2P networks for files, but users will not be able to download them. That's due to a filtering function that will keep users from downloading "illegitimate" files found on other PCs on the network. Some free downloads will be allowed, such as those in the public domain or by artists who release the songs themselves. Videos less than 15 minutes long or 50MB in size can also be downloaded, which rules out most of the stuff file-sharers would be looking for (e.g., tv shows, movies).

So, basically, you pay for a service that doesn't let you download anything copyrighted? Or any video longer than 15 minutes? You can only get your hands on public domain music? What a deal. You can use every other free P2P application and pay some attention to what you download. Same result, but you save $6.99 per month.