RadioActive Takes Napster Cue--With a New Spin

It’s no secret that the music industry hates Napster. But how will it feel about RadioActive?

RadioActive is just one of what is almost certain to be a swarm of Web-based music services aiming to satisfy users’ thirst for downloadable music without drawing legal gunfire from the recording industry.

Scheduled to be released for public use Monday, RadioActive (https://www.radioactive.com) works by scanning as many as 1,500 Internet radio stations. Users select their favorite artist and then RadioActive automatically scans for songs by those artists. When an online station plays a song by one of the selected artists, the program automatically downloads the music to the user’s computer, from which it can be played at will.

Each downloaded music file, meanwhile, is encrypted so it stays on one computer to prevent it from being copied again or shared via a Napster-style program.

“We lock the file to the first machine it’s downloaded to,” said Bill Putnam, the audio and recording engineer who developed the program and is releasing it through his private company, Audio Mill, based in Santa Cruz.

Despite RadioActive’s encryption claims, “one concern is if the files reside on a [computer disk], why can’t it be hacked?” asked Mark Mooradian, vice president and senior analyst with Jupiter Media Metrix.

Still, it is unclear how the music industry will greet RadioActive or other hybrid services tied to the Web. Officials of the Recording Industry Assn. of America, which brought a lawsuit against Napster on behalf of its member recording companies, say the license that is granted online radio stations to Webcast songs does not extend to any reproduction or distribution of the recordings.

“That includes a digital download” to a user’s computer, said Steven Marks, RIAA’s senior vice president for business affairs. Marks has not seen a version of RadioActive.

The RIAA’s legal position, he said, is that the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 allows people to copy music and other material for their private, noncommercial use as long as they use certain specified devices. These include tape recorders and compact disc players, but not computers.

“Generally, capturing a digital stream into a copy that’s then available [for further copying or sharing] would be a ‘reproduction’ and would need a separate license,” he said.

But Putnam said he devised RadioActive partially as a response to Napster’s success as well as its drawbacks.

“Napster is viral,” he said, referring to the speed with which it accumulates devoted users. “But it’s also illegal and can’t be tamed. The question is how to turn that into a viable music distribution scenario?”

Putnam said he took pains to ensure that RadioActive steered clear of the digital piracy shoals that have brought Napster its legal woes.

He delayed launching his service for more than a month to accommodate any new federal court rulings in the music industry’s lawsuit against Napster. This week a federal judge ordered Napster to block the availability of all copyrighted songs identified by music companies.

Putnam also scrapped earlier versions of RadioActive that would have allowed users to download their captured files to CD or share them with others. Although the downloaded files are far short of CD-caliber sound because they are captured from the variable-quality stream of Webcast music, Putnam concluded that might not be enough to keep users from uploading them to the Web.

Instead, he hopes that by encrypting the downloaded files he is laying the foundation for a profit-making service. The idea is that RadioActive users might pay a fee--presumably to be shared with recording companies or copyright holders--to acquire higher-grade digital versions of their favorite songs.

Because online radio stations are required to provide data identifying artists, song names and albums they will play, RadioActive’s program can scan this material to pick out songs before they start playing.

Putnam is the son of the late Bill Putnam Sr., a recognized audio pioneer whose 1947 recording of the Harmonicats’ “Peg O’ My Heart” was the first pop record to be a million-selling hit.

After raising a round of financing from friends and family, he received backing from Richard Wolpert, a former Disney online executive who helped start or finance such e-commerce experiments as Checkout.com and Scour.com and is now managing director of Calabasas-based Chance Technologies, a privately held investment and consulting company in entertainment and technology.