Aimster (Madster)

» see aimster.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

aim was the american messenger. in turkey we were on icq through the dial-up years and switched to msn around 2002 when ttnet adsl arrived. aimster was a US-only orbit story for me. honestly, i read about it on slashdot mirrors and in the napster-collapse aftermath, but i never installed it. by 2001 i was using napster while it lasted, then audiogalaxy after the napster injunction landed.

john deep was a professor at rensselaer polytechnic. honestly, he built aimster after his daughter aimee used aim. the original idea was to take napster's file-share model and wire it into the aim buddy lists people already had on aol instant messenger. the launch was august 2000, six months after napster shipped and a year before napster itself was shut down.

the pitch was privacy. on napster everyone could search every other user's library, on aimster you could only share with buddies in your contact list. the assumption was that this made it harder to police. an encrypted transfer layer was added around march 2001 to push that argument further. by mid 2001 aimster had a paid 'plus' subscription at 4.95 a month and a brief licensing deal with capitol records to distribute radiohead promo content.

the riaa sued in may 2001. aol forced the rename to madster in 2002 over the 'aim' trademark conflict. a federal court issued an injunction on december 4 2002 ordering deep to disconnect the network. the seventh circuit upheld it in june 2003, with judge richard posner writing the opinion that encryption-as-willful-blindness was not a valid copyright defense. the supreme court declined to hear the appeal in january 2004.

the posner ruling is the part of aimster that survived past 2004. honestly, it is cited in every dmca-era case about platforms claiming ignorance of what their users do. mgm v grokster two years later relied on it. the aimster client itself was lost, the company was bankrupt by 2002. john deep dropped out of the file-sharing story and back into academic work. the aimee namesake never publicly commented as far as i can tell.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually did ~

the client looked like a thin file-sharing skin grafted onto aim. you logged into your aim account, picked a folder to share, then could search through any buddy who was also running aimster. the transfer was peer-to-peer once the search resolved. honestly, the central index lived on aimster's servers, which was the legal vulnerability the riaa attacked.

pc magazine reviewed it in 2001 and gave it one star out of five. honestly, the interface was a mess of advertising panels and the catalog was thinner than napster's because the buddy-list constraint capped what any one user could find. it was a tool whose technical idea was clever and whose execution was rough.

~ the precedent ~

the seventh circuit opinion in re aimster is the legacy. judge posner wrote that a service that 'turns a blind eye' to obvious infringement by adding encryption it cannot decrypt is not insulated from contributory liability. that doctrine got bolted into the grokster decision the following year, and it shaped how every subsequent platform reasoned about user uploads. youtube's content id and dropbox's hash-matching both sit downstream of the aimster ruling. spotify's takedown flow runs on the same logic.

the funny part is that aimster the product was tiny. peak user counts were in the hundreds of thousands at most, dwarfed by napster and by audiogalaxy. the case mattered more than the userbase. it was decided right when the dmca was still being interpreted in court and judges were figuring out how much an operator had to know before they were on the hook.

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