Napster Clone With Pay Per Download

Judg3 writes " This story over at Wired.Com talks about a new Napster clone with a twist, pay per download. Yep, thats right. MoJoNation offers a "cross between Napster and eBay," says Jim McCoy, the 30-year-old CEO of Autonomous Zone Industries, the makers of Mojo. They want to create the first file-sharing economy of agents, servers, and search engines in which senders and receivers can agree on prices for each transaction and use micropayments to get paid. These payments are called (aptly enough) mojo. Their web page doesnt say much, well ok it says nothing. But theres some activity over at SourceForge. Though not a whole lot." Micropayments are definitely a holy grail for the internet: It could affect web pages too: I'd pay a micro-payment to yank banner ads from websites I frequent. And I'd pay a few cents to download a new track. The last question is how micro is micro enough? A half cent per web page? A Quarter per audio track?

Comments

I read it. perhaps you should think about it more

[TheDullBlade]

In the future...we hope

That's no reason to use them now. I don't care what they do might possibly do in the future, or what their hopes and dreams are, I care about the service they are providing now, which basically sucks.

Well give youself a pat on the back for being skeptical, but let me ask you this, oh trusting e-gold user. How do you know that e-gold ACTUALLY backs up your deposits with real metal? Have you seen it? Are they audited by a third party?

With e-gold's old system, anyone was permitted to go see it. With their new system, they are audited by a very well-respected 3rd party. Furthermore, you can have them send you a check for the amount in your account, and you'll usually be communicating with the person you're sending the money to, so you immediately know whether or not the money was transferred. They can only screw you once before you realize it (this is the basis of most trust: if they screw you once, you can sick the cops on them, if that doesn't work, they lose all the future profit from your business anyway).

These fairtunes guys, OTOH, are asking you to trust that they'll send your money through, with no way for you to confirm that they sent it, and no 3rd party observers of any kind.

They could cheat you and the musicians over and over again and probably get away with it.

So why should we trust them?

Right... and all I need to do in that case as the patron is track down each artist's home page, and then manually transfer money from my e-gold account to theirs, not to mention I have to have an e-gold account in the first place. Quite a lot of work for micropayments, no? Ditto with PayPal.

If the musicians were interested in doing this, the best source for their music would be their homepage.

A directory of musician's home pages with free music and e-gold payment forms would be fairly easy to set up and more convenient to use than a Napster/Fairtunes combination. It would also be more trustworthy and provide better MP3 downloads. Filling out the transfer forms would be something to do while you download the files (whether the ones you're donating for, or new ones while you donate for ones you've downloaded in the past).

At any rate, paying through e-gold is simpler than the forms you have to fill out at Fairtunes.

This may come as a shock, but musicians' music is being freely distributed as we speak, without their permission!

Some of them are also trying to sue people who are distributing it. They certainly aren't helping the distribution process, by distributing well-made MP3s. I would rather pay people who don't try to hold a legal stick over my head and who help the free distribution process, to encourage others to do the same.

If you want to know where my sympathies lie, read my essay on the economics of giving products away and asking for donations. I think it is important to reserve your donation money for people who ask for it. It is also important for them to disclose how much they are getting in this manner, so others can see that what they are doing is profitable and follow their lead.

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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.

Bad Mojo

[XNormal]

I see that a lot of slashdotters here have already made up their mind that this project is evil/sucks/is never going to work/dumb. There are tons of reasons why any particular project may succeed or fail but the model behind this one actually looks like it might work.

The way I understand this there are two unrelated "payment" systems involved: the first is a reputation-based system with "Mojo" as its currency. It is designed to increase reliability and reduce the amount of junk on the system. People that have unreliable systems or post junk will have bad reputation and won't get much "Mojo". The other payment system is voluntary, it involves real money and it lets people compensate the producers of the original material, while the Mojo system will only let you pay other users of the system for the storage, CPU and bandwidth involved in distributing the data.


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Mojo isn't just simple pay-to-download

[Dr. Spork]

I understood the article differently from the way the posts here seem to want to take it. I thought there would be no money leaking out of the system, except maybe a little cut for Mojo developers. The idea is that you don't actually *pay* for a download; you just get negative mojo karma for downloading, which you can cancel out if you let someone upload. So it's not like they're really charging you money. The micropayments are an inscentive for you to share your files.

This way, a dorm-kiddie on a T1 can fill up half of his 60Gig drive with MP3s, connect to Mojo, and watch the mojo karma roll in. I guess it could then be sold off, so you can actually MAKE money on this scheme (by hijacking university bandwidth; hmm...).

I think this is in principle a good idea exactly because it really encourages people to post stuff. I think that almost all recent music would quickly be posted on the site by people fishing for suckers. I think this is great. Napster could still run alongside, sort of the "poor man's trading program," but if you need something really rare, you'd log in on Mojo and pay for it, or, stay logged in on Mojo and hope people download from you so that you don't have to pay.

Problems (many already mentioned here; somewhat redundant):

1. Morons and idiots are still using the Xing mp3 encoder and other inferior products. From the filename and size you don't see how well it was encoded--not until you've paid for it. The system would encourage people to encode their MP3s using the fastest encoders available, which also happen to be the ones producing the most horrible results. (benchmarks). How would we reward good citizens like me who use only LAME 3.8x -V1 -h (which is what everyone with working ears should be using, by the way...)? Sure, it eats up CPU cycles...

2. Here's a get-rich-quick scheme: make up filenames like "Britney Spears-live rare bootleg Sao Paulo98-Pinball Wizard.mp3" That would earn you some uploads! Of course the file itself would be a recording of you lauging (all the way to the bank). So you would need an E-bay type ratings system for each user, that would show a username in red, for example, if they had bad ratings. But if you get bad ratings just use up any credit left in your account, ditch it and start all over again with a clean one, or get your buddy to write compliments like on Ebay. I just don't see how this would self-regulate.

Shit... need to go .. submit!

Interesting, but...

[psychosis]

How would it be handled with all of those failed/aborted downloads? If it's 10 cents per track, and I get 65% of the track, do I get charged 6.5 cents??
Also, how would they handle the initial population of files? If I use the software, and offer my collection of mp3's (ripped from discs I own), do the copyright holders receive a cut of money that others pay to get my stuff? Do I get anything like credit towards use of the service?
I admit, I haven't delved too deep into their (really, really thin) page, but does the RIAA give their servers all of the files to offer?
Good idea - definitely more palatable to the monopolists than Napster, but it seems like there are a lot of potential shortfalls.... I'm hopeful, though!

Re:Interesting, but...

[burris]

Mojo Nation isn't a "pay per download" service like you might expect.

There are two types of payment systems built-in: Mojo and the PayLars system. The payment of the data is seperated from the payment of the delivery of the data. Mojo is a microcurrency economy backed by CPU, Disk, and Bandwidth. Whenever you want to search, upload, or download, or whatever, you pay in Mojo. Mojo is like digital cash, you can give the tokens to other people.... or sell them (on eBay or whatever). You can also earn Mojo by running a content tracker/searcher, a block server, or a relay server.

You download whatever you want, you pay whoever you got it from a little Mojo for their bandwidth and disk space. After the fact, if you liked it a lot, you can leave a "tip" for the artist/publisher (I believe in real money). So if your HD crashes you just download it again from someone.

Data is broken into lots of small redundant chunks. Only half of the available chunks are necessary to recreate the file. So the system is resistant to servers disappearing or hard drives getting cleared. Popular data stays around since the servers earn Mojo for letting people download it. You also put a lot less load on each individual server since you only need a small part of the total amount of data from each one. The client keeps track of which servers offer fast and reliable service.

Mojo Nation is intended to make in inexpensive to serve popular data, with a built-in way to get paid for it. Right now, it costs a lot to serve popular data; you need a fast connection and big servers.

Burris

whatever...

[The_Messenger]

Uh-huh. Sure, this is going to catch on. Really.

Even if Napster were shut down, someone would code a copy that hides itself in SMTP packets or something. I've met too many frightening MP3 addicts to believe that we can ever go back to a pre-Napster world. Pay for music? Yeah, right...

---------///----------
All generalizations are false.

Re:whatever...

[ToLu the Happy Furby]

To a musician, making their recorded, copyrighted work available to others at no charge is tanamount to theft of their livlihood and art.

So if I make a musician's recorded, copyrighted work available to others at no charge by playing my new CD for a room of my friends, that's theft?

Or if I make a musician's recorded, copyrighted work available to others at no charge by making a mix tape (or mix CD-R) out of CD's I own, that's theft?

Well, so maybe that wasn't meant to say. But I bet you think what you meant to say was something like, if I make a musician's recorded, copyrighted work available to others by offering my computer's services to send them a copy of it at no charge, monetary or otherwise, then that's theft. Right? Cause then you said:

And yes, it's illegal.

Well no, it's not.

All three of the above activities were explicitly made legal by Congress with the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act. The last was specifically reaffirmed in the 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which had the opportunity to change the rules regarding non-commercial copying of (copyrighted) musical recordings, but instead just chose to redefine "non-commercial" to include any explicit quid pro quo exchange. Notice that that means the sort of activity which goes on on Napster--that is, "making a recorded, copyrighted work available to others at no charge--is explicitly protected by the law.

I think the difference between the Napster debacle and something like alcohol prohibition is that prohibtion took a legal product (alcohol) and made it illegal.

Is that what you think. The actual fact is that the Napster case...err, "debacle" is precisely akin to suing someone for serving alchohol in the years prior to prohibition. Indeed, just a few weeks ago Congress took what would be the first step towards making the trading which takes place on Napster--which, again, is currently legal pursuant to the AHRA--and making it illegal. They held hearings on the matter, thus giving the RIAA the opportunity to try to buy their 4th (by my count) major anti-constitutional extension of copyright law in the last decade. Happily, current indications are that Congress has decided 3 laws bought and paid for was enough for now. Maybe it's just that even today 20 million constituants are worth more than 20 million dollars.

So, nice try, but no cigar. Of course, your insistance on emphasizing that these aren't just any recordings, but *COPYRIGHTED!!* recordings, should have been the first tipoff that you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Guess what: copyright means a great deal less than you must think. And thank god it does, because *every* recorded utterance--whether it's the Post-It note I jot down, my answering machine message, or (heh heh) the playlist I just made in Winamp--is automatically copyrighted. That's right: that time I recorded myself farting into my computer's microphone is afforded exactly the same precious copyright protections as Lars and James' latest post-structuralist masterwork. Even though Metallica's may be a creation of perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness, originality and moral truth and mine might just be loud repetitive ass-noise.

To wit: no one is allowed to **sell** (this means for a charge) either of our recordings without our express permission. That's about the extent of it.

Well, ok, so there's more: but it's all bad for you. So it turns out people actually *can* sell derivatives of Lars' new magnum opus (or of recorded flatulence)--provided the derivations fall within the various allowed "fair uses" of copyrighted material. That means Dr. Dre can sell a record which samples Lars' new drum solo without his permission, so long as the resulting work is more than just a simple repackaging of Lars' peerless musical artistry. It also means academians the world over can include as much of the original as they need to support their insights as they rush out their breathless analyses of James Hatfield's latest lyrical and historical tour-de-force.

Whether you go out and buy the CD the next day is completely irrelevant if you were never given permission to copy the work in the first place. Think of it this way: if you steal $50 from someone, and send them a check for $500 the next day, you're still guilty of theft.

Oh please. The difference, obviously, is that in your ridiculous analogy, the person a) cannot use those $50 until they get a check several days later and b) knows they were stolen from and thus feels less secure in their person/bank account/however the $50 was stolen in the first place. (Well, the difference is that taking money is theft and sharing music isn't, but I digress.) If there were a way to guarantee that the person who got the money "stolen" from them would always have at least their original amount of money any time they checked and/or wanted to buy something, then it's actively doubtful whether such a practice would be illegal or not. Incidentally, the normal operations of both our banking system and stock markets are predicated upon exactly such a system...

In any case, it is established fair use that you can listen to/watch/read/whatever a copyrighted product before you purchase it to see if you want to spend your money on it, so you're entirely wrong in yet another way!!

The law doesn't care if the victim is better off in the end. The law is the law.

Sorry kiddo--you're 0 for...well, how ever many this is. Amazingly, you got this one DOUBLE wrong!!

1) In order to bring a suit in this country you must have some claim of demonstrable harm. This is one of the most basic principles of law.

2) It turns out that copyright law cares even more if the "victim" is better off in the end. Indeed, the copyright law on the books makes a special point of exempting apparent infringements of copyright as fair use if they end up causing no harm to the "victim". So whereas for most "harmless" civil crimes, the law would technically be broken but the "victim" just couldn't legally sue over it, in the case of copyright law, "harmless" infringement is a legal non sequiter.

If you don't like the law, stop whining and do something about it. Organize, demonstrate, and vote.

ROFL!! So I guess you and all the top-level RIAA executives are going to stage your own little 36-man-and-one-woman-march on Washington???

No, I'm betting you'll all just keep whining. Although at least they're spending millions on lobbyists and bribes, which is more than you can say for yourself.

I agree with Lars wholeheartedly, and I think it is the duty of mega-bands to take a stand, because while Metallica won't feel the pinch of lost CD revenue, less successful musicians will.

I'd be rolling on the floor laughing again if the real situation weren't so tragically pitiful. The fact is that "less successful musicians"--by which I mean the bottom 90% of the lucky perhaps 2% who even get signed by a major label in the first place--never ever see a penny in album royalties. The only money they ever make to live on (from their music jobs at least) comes from pre-album advances.

Unfortunately for them, in the extraordinary event that their measly 5% or so royalty is enough to pay off what they "owe" the record label for studio time, producer time, studio supplies, promotion, marketing, "promotional CD's" like those at Columbia House etc. (yep--those come directly out of the artist's pockets. Hope you feel good about yourself for buying from music clubs now...), tour scheduling, tour equipment, tour promotion, etc. (they "owe" the record companies for all this stuff even though the record company gets to divvy up the remaining 95% of the money)...they even need to pay off the amount of their advance before the band can finally make a cent in royalties. And all the debt from previous, less successful albums follows them until they get out of their contract or go bankrupt (a not uncommon occurance).

Metallica, in rather sharp contrast, keeps something like 80% of the profit from their album sales, because they essentially have their own record label. Now guess who's the ones standing up for the $18-for-a-$1-CD and locked-down-monopolistic-distribution-model way of doing things? Err...I mean, uh, standing up for the, um, for the little bands...

In the end, Napster users are just whining because they want something for nothing, at the expense of artists.

No, Napster users aren't whining at all. They're busy sharing perhaps the largest collection of art ever indexed in one place. They're busy using the Internet up to its true promise--to spread art and ideas effortlessly throughout society, against the wishes of those who have profited by keeping ideas bottled up.

In case you hadn't noticed, it's the RIAA which is bitching to the media, suing everyone in sight, lobbying Congress for unreasonable extension of copyright privileges beyond anything envisioned in the Constitution for the 4th time in 9 years, raising the price of CD's even in the face of a free and superior distribution channel, and dragging their feet on providing a way for fans to both get music in a reasonable digital format (which almost certainly will not include support for fair use rights) while still compensating their favorite artists.

And it's you who's whining (quite ignorantly, I might add).

Which, as a musician, I find absolutely disgusting.

Which, as a /. participant interested in the truth, a citizen interested in my fair use rights and right to non-commercial sharing of recorded music, and a music lover interested in sampling as much new and worthwhile musical art as possible, I find...rather annoying to say the least.

Meanwhile, for everyone who wants to help break musicians free of a monopolistic model which steals artistic, promotional and distributional control of their art and steals the profits of their labor, you might want to check out fairtunes.com, which will forward your money directly to artists whose work has moved you, rather than lining the pockets of RIAA executives who have done nothing but sue Napster in an effort to stop you from exercising your Constitutional fair use rights. Even if you only contribute $5 for that CD you burned/downloaded, that's approximately 5-7 times as much as the artist would get had you paid $17 for the CD in the store--and plus it's money they can use today, not once their record label "debts" are paid off, if ever.

Re:whatever...

[jms]

if I make a musician's recorded, copyrighted work available to others at no charge by making a mix tape (or mix CD-R) out of CD's I own, that's theft?

Yes, it is. The artist receives no payment for that copy of his music.

No, when you bought the audio CDR, part of the money you paid was, by law, placed in a special fund to compensate the major recording labels. You paid actual money, which went to actual artists. Go look up the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA). It's easy to find on the internet.

Well no, it's not.

Yes, it is illegal. That's what I've always been told. When did it change? Haven't you ever read the back of a CD? I have one right here -- "(C)opyright 2000 [artist's name]. All rights reserved. Unauthorized duplication is a violation of applicable laws in the USA." So when you distribute copies of that music, whether on CD-R or on Napster, you're committing an illegal activity. Everybody does it, but that does not change the fact that you're breaking the law. And if you're telling me that these "applicable laws" provide no such protection, we need harsher laws. Fucking selfish American consumers.

Had it ever occurred to you that the record companies might be overstating their actual rights, because they don't want you to know about yours?

Go back to the Audio Home Recording Act, and read paragraph 1008 if you want to find out what your actual rights are, instead of trusting the record companies to spell them out for you on the back of CDs.

Great idea - but who benefits?

[Eloquence]

The interesting question is whether, how and why the actual creators of "intellectual property" will get paid. It's OK if service providers get a piece of the pie, but this piece should be the smallest of all.

I prefer a model like the "Street Performer Protocol" recently utilized by Stephen King. I'm also fond of voluntary contributions to artists and other creators. What I would not like to see is a huge bazaar where Joe Average gets 5 bucks for trading the latest Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling gets nothing for writing it.

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Re:micropayments / banner ads

[itp]

Sigh. Thanks for summing up the opinions of the vocal but immature minority, and providing fodder for the arguments of those who oppose the revolution in media delivery. Those who favor conventional methods will fail, but thanks to people like you, I'll still have to buy my CD's at Best Buy for a rediculous $15 for a while.

--
Ian Peters

Good idea...

[RainbowSix]

I would pay like a dollar to be promised a high bandwidth download with the song in perfect condition instead of doing time consuming search with half the results only partial songs, or songs with skips or any other deformalitys in them.

Re:Worse than napster.

[jcsmith]

I think the only way this works is if the RIAA gets a cut of the money and get's to set the rules. Besides why should I pay when I can pay $9.99/month and get unlimited mp3 downloads legally through emusic.com. This way I get a good deal and the musicians get some money for their work,

Fairtunes.com

[ewhac]

There's a new organization called Fairtunes.com where you can send a mini-payment ($1, $5, etc.) to the musical artist of your choice. It's an attempt at the "tipping jar" model of artist remuneration.

I think it's worth checking out.

Schwab

Napster is a bad model for paid material

[John Jorsett]

I don't understand why so many people think the Napster model is the way to go in the for-pay distribution business. For all its glories, Napster is, quite frankly, a hassle. Even when I manage to find an offering of what I'm looking for, about 1 in two of my Napster downloads succeed. Not to mention the times that I've invested half an hour in getting something from a person running a 28.8 modem only to have them shut off the machine before the download completes. Why would anyone offering product for money retain a distribution model that relies on a loose confederation of oft-unreliable amateurs? I'm willing to put up with it if it doesn't cost me anything, but if I'm being charged, I want something better. They'll sell a lot more of their stuff if they simply put put the material on a solid server with a nice fat-pipe connection.

By the way, if Napster ever goes off-line, there's a site that provides a browser interface to the Gnutella stuff without your having to run Gnutella itself (take the Napster hassles and multiply by 3 and you have Gnutella). www.gnute.com.

Slate.com

[yankeehack]

Uhhhh....it seems that prior experiments with subscription based services haven't been all that successful in the past.

Think of slate.com, for example. Originally a subscription based service, Microsoft gave slate.com's founders (Michael Kinsley-I think??) boatloads of money to get the service up and running and did not require the service to make a profit for several years. However, not enough people came to make it successful and they just recently made the service free.

The only subscription based service that I can think of as doing well is the Motley Fool, which is a finance site. And I think that they offer up to the second info, which makes it so attractive to the stock market set.

Just a final thought if I have to start paying micropayments for content, does that mean I *still* have to pay ISP fees?

Micro Payments & Digital Cash

[DrWiggy]

Interesting idea, and the thought of paying micro payments to view/hear/whatever content has got me thinking a bit.

The first problem is that we need an open-source, reliable and secure digital cash protocol for this to work over the entire net. Mojo doesn't seem to fit this bill, because I would imagine (and I am guessing here) that it's going to be just a bunch of CGI's. I also predict that people will use them to launder credit card numbers etc. through them, but anyway....

Once we have a really good digital cash protocol that everybody accepts and starts using, we need to then work out exchange rates dynamically and properly - if the internet currency is different to real currency then the price you pay today for your content will be different to what you paid yesterday.

There is then the problem of security. Ideally we would want a peer-to-peer system whereby your client pays the site directly. The problem here is how does the site get the money back out of the net economy into his bank, and seeing as all he is actually receiving is a string of bits, what is going to stop people printing (or rather sprintf()'ing) their own money?

Because of these issues, we need to get a broker involved somewhere. The broker is going to need to take his cut, and the broker can probably also fix the exchange rates thereby controlling the value of the currency. If the broker wanted to shut out a given country, he could just fix the exchange rate of that country high, etc. That's a lot of power and one that has traditionally fallen with governments rather than companies attempting to make a profit. There may be a conflict in intrests, so maybe the way to do this is to actually get a government to do this, but then we need to ask which one? All very complicated.

It's only after those issues are addressed that we can really start talking about micropayments en masse. This particular site is cute (legally dubious), but it doesn't scale up outside onto the rest of the net. Maybe one day somebody will actually do something about this and the quality of content might even rise. I'd put more hours into my website if I though I was going to get money from it! :-)

Re:Why new payment method?

[eudas]

Micropayments are just another way for people to turn the Internet into a more common cash-cow media like selling commercials on TV and radio.

If you really want to get rid of banner ads, use an agent like Junkbuster (http://www.junkbuster.com/) or Webwasher (http://www.webwasher.com/).

eudas

Fairtunes is a ripoff

[TheDullBlade]

4% plus 25 cents is way too expensive. It makes microdonations infeasible.

If you use something like e-gold, you end up losing about a total of 4% in the put-money-in, transfer, get-money-out sequence, regardless of the size and number of transactions. So you easily put $20 in, dole it out to hundreds of musicians in pennies, and over $19 would come through. All the musician needs is to create a free e-gold account and list it on their home page.

If you can use PayPal (i.e. if you're American and the music group is American), you can send money for no transfer cost.

If they were really serious about providing a service, they'd also list other means by which you can pay the artists directly, instead of insisting that all the money go through their own hands. Also, read the FAQ, they aren't audited by any third party, and their reasoning for why they wouldn't just pocket the money is very unconvincing (hmm, thousands of dollars going through your service every day to already-rich musicians, many of which you don't listen to and some of the most profitable you actively dislike, but even given the free choice, you'd rather send it to them than pocket it or redirect it to your own favorite musicians. Yeah, right).

Besides, the musicians have not said that they are willing to be paid this way. I would much rather give money to musicians who give permission for their music to be freely distributed.

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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.