Qtrax: Free and legal file-sharing? Maybe not

Last weekend, a company called Qtrax made a big splash by announcing "the world's first free and legal peer-to-peer digital music site". It turns out that line of marketing nonsense was only the beginning of the company's misdirections.

After announcing deals to provide music from Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group and EMI Recorded Music at the Midem music conference in Cannes, Qtrax CEO Allan Klepfisz told CNET.co.uk's sister site News.com on Sunday that there may not be agreements "written in stone". With such shenanigans involved, it's unlikely those agreements will ever be signed.

What's most unfortunate about the whole affair is that the name of a fine open-source project has been dragged through the mud. Songbird is a Firefox analogue that adds media playback and library-management features to the popular browser. It's very cool, with tonnes of potential, but it's still unstable and in need of much development.

Qtrax simply grabbed the Songbird code, slapped in a few of its own extensions, added a big advertising banner on the top and a bookmark to the Qtrax Web site, and then launched this version of Songbird as its own. Qtrax didn't even write a new license or even rename the installer. Shenanigans, part two.

In essence, if you download Qtrax, you will get a beta application, hijacked by beta advertising modules, and offering zero free content. Sorry. Not good enough for us. Forgive us if we feel the need to sic Netdisaster on the Qtrax Web site.

We would love to see a viable, advertising-supported digital-music model, but we would be very surprised if Qtrax is the one to provide it.

Would you use a 'free', advertising-supported P2P file-sharing client? If not, what's on your list for the perfect digital-music delivery system? Tell us about it in the comments. -Peter Butler