Blubster

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

~ the goodbye ~

Every other file-sharing program of that era was built on somebody else's network. Blubster was not. Pablo Soto, born in Madrid in 1979, wrote the protocol underneath it himself in 2001 and called it MANOLITO, which everyone shortened to MP2P. It moved its searches over UDP on a single port and kept no central index, so there was no company server to raid and no list of who was sharing what.

The client on top of it was a music search box. Type a song, get results, get the file. Piolet was the same network wearing a different face, and in May 2006 a third client called Manolito arrived alongside new versions of both. The pitch through all of it was that the program did not spy on you, which was worth saying out loud in a year when the alternatives were arriving with three toolbars attached.

The file-sharing argument where I was did not run through this software. On a Turkish connection in those years you used whatever the people around you were already using, because a network is only worth as much as what is currently in it, and that meant Kazaa first and then eDonkey and eMule. Blubster was Spanish-first and music-only, and it never had the one thing that decides these fights, which is other people.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually was ~

MP2P borrowed the decentralized shape of Gnutella and then did its own search routing over UDP port 41170. There were no supernodes owned by anybody, no login, no account. The design goal was that your address stayed out of the transaction as far as the protocol could manage it, and the marketing rounded that up to anonymity, which it was not quite.

Soto stepped back from the MP2P community in 2004 and the network started shedding people from that point on. Later builds of the client shipped with the Dealio toolbar bundled in, which is the same adware bargain the download-manager business was making at the time. A program whose entire selling point was that it was clean does not survive that for long.

~ the case ~

In June 2008 Promusicae and the major labels sued MP2P Technologies for thirteen million euros, arguing unfair competition rather than copyright infringement, which was the more interesting attack: not that Soto had copied anything, but that he had built a business on other people's catalogs. It took three and a half years.

On 21 December 2011 a Madrid commercial court acquitted him and called the applications totally neutral, holding that a developer is not answerable for what people do with a tool. The plaintiffs appealed, the Madrid provincial court threw the appeal out, and by May 2014 they gave up rather than take it further. Spain ended up with something almost nowhere else has, a final ruling that writing this class of software is lawful work.

~ the long tail ~

The vindication arrived years after the audience left. Spotify had launched in 2008 and reached Spain immediately, and by 2014 the argument about downloading music had simply stopped being an argument. The last real version of blubster.com was advertising free torrent downloads and claiming twenty million installs, which is what a P2P brand turns into when the network under it is empty.

In January 2015 the site became a parking page and stayed one. mp2p.net and piolet.com are landers now too. Soto went in a direction almost none of his generation of P2P authors did: he stood for Madrid city council with Ahora Madrid that same year, won a seat, and spent four years running the city's citizen participation and transparency office before leaving in 2019.

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