Madster was one of the many P2P file sharing services that appeared in Napster's wake. Initially called AIMster, it worked by piggybacking on AIM, letting users see their friends' file listings and sharing files using the AIM network.

Madster was founded and run by Johnny Deep, who infused the entire company with his personality. Deep was able to continually attract venture capital funding, and often promoted his product as being able to do far more than it was ever intended to do (even suggesting at one point that it could be used as Knowledge Management software). He was well known by his employees for his "wild ideas". His daughter Madeline, who goes by the nickname Aimee, has been the covergirl of the website almost since its inception, and it helped launch a slight modeling career for her.

AOL challenged AIMster's right to use their name in court, since AOL believed that it was derived from their AIM trademark. Although Deep claimed it was based on his daughter's nickname, he had also registered the domain "icqster.com" at the same time he registered "aimster.com". Additionally employees of Aimster have later said that the nickname "Aimee" never existed until after AOL sued them. Most people believe that the name AIMster came from crossing AIM with Napster. AIMster lost the case. They briefly considered changing their name to IMster, but then settled on Madster. Deep claimed that Madster was based on the other nickname of his daughter.

Madster actively promoted itself as the company fighting the RIAA. The original AIMster website had the tagline "Target the RIAA" along with their traditional target logo. When they were forced to change their name to Madster, they included a little rhyme on the front page:

Big companies are lamester

No, you can't call us amester

But if it still works the samester

What's in a namester

Eventually they even had to change that to censor the word "amester."

Although Madster certainly had the support of the EFF, and captured the hearts of the geek community who supported P2P and distrusted the RIAA, legal analysts said that their case would not be a good one to take before the Supreme Court because of how centralized the Madster system was, making it not a good representative of P2P. They were afraid that a P2P precedent created by the Supreme Court based on the Madster case would not be favorable.

In 2002, after some complicated legal manuevering in the courts with the RIAA, U.S. District Judge Marvin Aspen sided with the RIAA and ordered Madster to keep lists of all of the songs being traded, and block the ones that infringed on copyrights.

In December after not complying with the order, Madster was just outright ordered to shut down its servers. The reason was that Madster encrypted the contents of the files, which made it impossible for the RIAA to determine who were illegally sharing their protected music. Initially, Madster's encryption (they were still AIMster when they started this) was the most basic encryption you could get away with and still call it encryption. The only reason Madster implemented an encryption scheme at all was to be able to legally say that it was unable to monitor its users' activities because it would be against the Digital Rights Act to decrypt anything. Later that month, the court found Madster in contempt for not complying, and handed them a $51,000 fine.

A federal appeals court upheld the decision on June, 2003. On November 11, 2003, Johnny Deep petitioned the Supreme Court to hear his case. They denied his request on January 13, 2004 [1].

Currently, although the webpage still exists, the actual Madster download is unavailable, and the webpage itself is full of broken links to sites about Johnny Deep's battle with the RIAA.

Madster reached its peak (in terms of press, number of users, and forum activity) right before they were forced to change their name from AIMster. After this point Johnny Deep wasn't able to attract new funding, and on August 10, 2001 they weren't able to pay their programming employees, who all quit shortly after. Madster tried to change to a subscription service, but it wasn't enough to keep the company alive. In February 2002 they offered to pay all of their former employees 50 cents on the dollar of what they owed.

Madster was located in downtown Albany, New York, although it originally came out of RPI's Incubator Center .

External links

• Madster
• An ex-employee's very bitter saga with Madster/Aimster
• Aimster Sues the Record Industry - March 3, 2001 MP3 Newswire article