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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?
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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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
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!
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!
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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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.
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It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
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.
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?
This is another view of the world.
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!