Imeem CEO Dalton Caldwell, whose company already offers a similar product,

The site uses a package of Javascript, Mootools, which was also used by Muxtape. And in the source code, an HTML comment reading "Liberating taste" appears where an ASCII graphic appears in the Muxtape source code. The launch of Opentape is likely a tactic in Muxtape's fight against the RIAA. It puts the record industry trade organization in the position of having to play whack-a-mole as mixes pop up on numerous clone sites using the open-source software. It also means that Muxtape's backers no longer have to shoulder the site's soaring bandwidth costs.

A tipster tells us Muxtape investor Jakob Lodwick has been heard to complain that the site's hosting bill alone amounts to $30,000 per day. That figure seems absurdly high — but could our tipster have misheard Lodwick saying the bill is $30,000 a month? After Muxtape's first day, Ouellette posted the site's stats, reporting 8,685 users uploading and playing 19,731 songs over 35,000 visits cost Muxtape $118.17 with Amazon's S3 online-storage service. Extrapolate that first day over a month, at Amazon's standard rates, and you've got a $3,545 hosting bill. Compete.com confirms that Muxtape's user base has grown at least tenfold since then, making a $30,000/mo. hosting bill not just plausible, but likely.

The bill is also far more than Lodwick or Ouellette seem to have expected. In an accidentally published investment term sheet, Ouellette estimated three months of hosting would cost $18,000. That's about $72,000 off the mark, enough to eat through Lodwick's $95,000 investment and shut down the site, angry letters from the RIAA or no.

"Please remove this script, it can only contribute to getting the site shut down," Ouellette wrote in April on Userscripts.org. "As long as you can hear the music you can copy it, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to do the diligence of trying to stop casual downloading (one of the things that would hurt its long-term viability)," he wrote on another occasion. "I was naïve enough to think assholes like you wouldn't want to wreak a good thing, but I guess I was wrong," he concluded.

He's been quieter since then, aside from suggesting the site would drop the popular MP3 format in an effort to stop downloaders. The scripters have kept up their efforts.

Not that this cat-and-mouse game matters. The RIAA has wisely left Muxtape alone, avoiding an ugly publicity squabble over a site that has yet to show any commercial potential. If it does begin to show some financial success, then the music-industry lawyers will swoop in demanding money.

People are swift to criticize the RIAA, which has made a number of boneheadedly unpopular moves. But what should we say about the naivete of entrepreneurs like Ouellette, who are hoping that battling Firefox script kiddies will somehow count in their favor when the record labels come knocking? Muxtape's lawyers might make a "safe harbor" argument under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — but that requires showing that Ouellette was unaware of copyright violations on the site. Hard to argue that, when he uses it himself.

He's posted the above image — details of an apparent deal with the devil — to his blog, titling it "For personal reference only, please don’t read!" He's gently mocking his former charge, Ouellette, who accidentally emailed terms of his own deal with the devilishly pranky Lodwick to his blog instead of his own inbox. We're hoping Pile's gag keeps running, and encourage you to accidentally leak all your deals to us.

Pile is in the comfortable position of being able to mock Lodwick, Vimeo's Iconoclastic founder, because according to one source, he's largely responsible for saving the site, growing its traffic 600 percent in the last 8 months. What's Pile done so well? Our source says Pile has kept his team focused on improving Vimeo's usability with tweaks here and there, increasing traffic in 5 and 10 percent bumps that have really added up. But also, our source says, Pile's done a very good job of not being Jakob Lodwick, whose "focuses were kind of on the wrong things."

Foolish disregard for his severance agreement aside, one has to ask this about Lodwick: What kind of entrepreneur or investor puts his deal terms online, in napkin or any other form? That's an easy one: the same kind of entrepreneur or investor who would relentlessly blog his sad relationship with noted New York nobody Julia Allison, quit the Internet over its injustices, rejoin the Internet in an effort to spread Ayn Rand's message, and then, in a huff for the ages, quit the Internet once more.

Update: Ouellette has taken the memo down, saying he posted it to the Web by accident.

This afternoon, someone gained access to our server and caused some problems. We are investigating and will have more information soon.

When asked about his involvement with Muxtape, Lodwick first denied it before backtracking. Then, after sources told us Lodwick might have broken his severance agreement in hiring Ouellette away from Connected Ventures to start Muxtape, Ouellette emailed us to say: "I created Muxtape by myself, thank you very much." We emailed back: "Who pays the bills at Muxtape?" No reply, but we've heard the answer is Lodwick.

Former Vimeo Web designer Justin Ouellette quit Connected Ventures on April 4 to work full-time on Muxtape. Ouellette says he's Muxtape's CEO and founder. In his blog post announcing the project, Lodwick claimed he was "hired" by Ouellette.

But we hear that Muxtape is just as much Jakob Lodwick's company as it Ouellette's. Lodwick may well be footing the bills. After Muxtape's first day, Ouellete wrote that server costs had already reached $118.17. Ouellette can't afford that kind of charge for very long, from what we hear about his finances. Lodwick, who with three other cofounders sold Connected Ventures to IAC, can.

And likely does. We're not surprised. Since shortly he left Connected Ventures, Lodwick has publicly sought to own and operate a music service on the Web. Lodwick is also an active investor in Web services he appreciates — such as David Karp's Tumblr. Lodwick has also served as Muxtape's chief marketer since its launch. (Our coverage of the company began when Lodwick posted about Muxtape nine days before Ouellette quit Connected Ventures.)

Asked if it's good for Connected Ventures and IAC to have departed execs poaching current employees for new startups, Connected Ventures president Josh Abramson told us, "No, it definitely isn't. But to the best of my knowledge that isn't what happened."

If Abramson's knowledge suddenly expands in the coming days, Lodwick wouldn't be the first engineer to get in hot water for poaching talent from an old company while starting a new one. Netscape founder Jim Clark hired away top Silicon Graphics engineers when he started Healtheon. But perhaps Jakob Lodwick isn't Jim Clark and Muxtape merely rhymes with Netscape.

I have a long history with mix tapes...ask my wife. It was the beginning of our relationship...I loved to make mix tapes that were fast-paced on Side 1 and slower-paced on Side 2 (especially for the ladies). I was what one could call a Mix Master. But the iPod has come into existence and tapes faded into the twilight. A gaping a void was left until now...

Muxtape is a website that resurrects the mix tape online. Upload MP3's into a mix tape and share it with friends. So here's mine...enjoy and maybe make your own too.

Swaggle is a group SMS doohickey from Hive Mind's Jordan Schwartz that makes Dodgeball and Twitter look overly complicated and self-involved. It's kinda like the phone tree your elementary school or little league team used to maintain, without all the fuss of having to maintain a public identity.

And leave it to a subversive sticker tycoon to come up with Metanotes. Srini Kumar's new venture gives you a big, flat space to pin web ephemera, to-do lists and other stuff to share with friends (or strangers). Like a corkboard at the supermarket or the flier kiosk at the student union.

Simple, free, and easy to use — these kids just might be on to something. If only Facebook app developers were so clever. (Photo by AP/Mel Evans)