EMI Group said today that it has licensed its music catalog to GNAB ("bang" spelled backwards), German media giant Bertelsmann's forthcoming legal peer-to-peer (P2P) platform for sharing music, movies, and games.

That gives GNAB access to 300,000 music tracks from artists including Coldplay, Gorillaz, Norah Jones, Faith Evans, KT Tunstall, and Joss Stone.

EMI inked the pan-European deal with arvato mobile, a unit of Bertelsmann subsidiary arm arvato.

"This agreement with GNAB is a huge step forward for authorized P2P offerings, and for the development of the next generation of subscription services in Europe," EMI's Doug Lucas said in a statement. Arvato said it already has licensing deals for individual countries with other music firms, including Sony BMG, Bertelsmann's joint venture with Sony.

"GNAB is an innovative milestone on the way to a new digital-download era," Bernhard Ribbrock, chief executive of arvato mobile, said in a statement. "Fully authorized P2P will enable consumers to access more music, allow retailers to offer interesting music products, provide new revenue streams for EMI Music, and strengthen arvato mobile's position.

GNAB hopes to offer access to 1 million songs when it launches. It is set to be up in Germany by the end of the year, with an eventual rollout to other countries through 2006 and beyond, the company said.

It will feature built-in copy-protection technology and a payment architecture, and arvato is shopping it around to companies who would license it to sell their own downloads. That means consumers wouldn't go to GNAB directly, but would use it a company that licenses it.

GNAB will be a decentralized P2P platform along the lines of the descendents of the original Napster. Decentralization prevents server overload and makes it possible for content providers to distribute large files like movies or games more easily.

GNAB is Bertelsmann's attempt to right itself in the P2P space after its failed investment in the original Napster in 2000 and subsequent purchase of the company in 2002. The company is still dealing with lawsuits filed against it for copyright infringement stemming from the days when Napster was the place to go for free music.

File-sharing services have long been the nemesis of the music and movie industries, but the dynamic has shifted in the past year, following the June 2005 US Supreme Court decision in MGM vs. Grokster. The court found in that case that P2P services can be sued for inducing copyright infringement taken in the course of marketing their services.

In subsequent months, several popular P2P services have shut down, one has rolled out a legal system, and several have promised to do the same.