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Google Wins the Filesharing Wars?
The Importance of writes "Compulsory licensing schemes such as those proposed by the EFF have been critiqued, but now LawMeme has an interesting article that claims Google will win the filesharing wars if a compulsory license is adopted."
There was a word written in roman script, though, which I understood.
The word was GOOGLE...
Compulsory licensing, eh? What's that when it's at home?
Perhaps I haven't been following closely enough, but exactly who is to be compelled to license what, from whom? Is this a big license signed between big companies, or a little license signed by people who listen to music, or those who make it, or just those who download it, or is it a shrink-wrap license like you get with software? Is it free, or does someone pay for it? Who? How much? What does it all mean? Am I the only person who doesn't know? PLEASE MOM, I WANT TO KNOW? WHY? WHY?
Ahem.
These sigs are more interesting tha
Firstly, I cannot begin to comprehend the effort required to stay on top of the copyrighted material being shared around the network. File hashes can be used for sure, but imaging the resources required for checking and verifying this. Sure, a few automated systems currently exist for music, but when we're talking about w2k3 iso's, DiVX movies etc, these are going to require some serious resources, whether computing or man-power to acheive this. Certainly this will be required to satisfy the RIAA, MPAA et al.
Secondly, assuming they acheive this, then what, in all honesty is the network going to be used for. Sure, there's currently the odd RH iso that get's distributed by bittorrent. With most sharers scared to offer their mp3 collection (ie combination of ripped of their own cd's and downloaded), few will bother weeding out their copyright free music to share. With no sharers, there's no network. Besides, at the moment indepedent music seems served quite happily by services such as mp3.com and others.
A Compulsory license is one which defines a preset rate for anyone to use without discrimination. Eg. The radio stations have a compulsory license that allows them to play any song they like as long as they pay the rights holder an amount based on number of listeners.
Musicians also have a compulsory license that allows them to perform or record any song written as long as the songwriter get payed a set amount.
then they would certainly rise to the top. Their search engine is by far head and shoulders above the rest. It is fast and efficient. However, I am not sure of two things.
The EFF can push all they want but I seriously doubt filesharing will ever become legal, even under a compulsory licence. The RIAA is now equating P2P with kiddy porn and therefore the reactionary dumbasses in Congress will jump on this now.
Second, Google picks and chooses its battles carefully. The recent purchase of blogging company illustrates this. I think they would have to decide that it is worth the hassle assuming again, it became legal in the first place.
In the event all this ever pans out, I, for one, will welcome our new Google overlords. (thought I would just go ahead and get that out of the way.)
No trees were harmed in the composition of this; however, numerous electrons were inconvenienced.
I don't believe the P2P companies are asking for compulsory licensing because they believe it is a good thing. I think they want it because then they can claim "we are seeking a legal alternative", knowing full well that although some kind of legalized P2P sharing is inevitable, it will take 5-10 years and the emergence of new media groups for it to happen, not some court ruling that "Hey, it's OK to download those trax now, d00ds!"
However, I agree with the other half of the article, which basically says "Google is God", something that has been obvious for several years. For many people, Google is the Internet, something AOL and MSN never managed to do with their fluff-filled "portals". Whatever new things come along, Google will be there, doing them better, leaner, faster,...
But it will be several dotcom lifetimes before Google will be the place to go to download no-longer-pirate tracks and movies. I don't think the P2P companies really have such a long horizon.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
I was bored, browsing AskJeeves (ask.com) to see what people were searching for (you can do that). One person (don't know if they were just stupid or what) was searching for "Where can I find the search engine Google?". I wouldn't trust one search engine to find another, now if they were looking for elgoog, ok, but they weren't. I suppose they could have been in china, but whatever.
He means Gnutella, a decentralized network, will give way to a faster, more efficient centralized network, such as Napster, and the RIAA and friends can't sue because of the licence.
Bandwidth is (or should be, turn uploading on leechers) shared on any network. Just the who gets what and where is centralized.
Come on. If google was the only search engine in town then I might agree with the idea but they aren't.
If Google started being assholes to their users most of them will simply go and use another search engine to find things. But they don't. So people keep using Google and the wonderful features it provides.
Well nice article and he clearly made some good points. But I'm not sure wether we want to have one (primary) source of information (searching) such as google. Monopolies tend to become to addictive to their own power which will make it even harder for them to give up. They'll try anything to fuck up the competition (look at some RedMond based compagny).
And some more alarming privacy issues are listed on http://www.google-watch.org/.
I'm still in favor of having the choice between several sources for searching/news/p2p/blogs. This will enhance the competition between the competitors and will make their services better.
Look at all the OSS. Most pieces of software have several forks or similar/related projects which ultimately results in a better piece(s) of software for a specific task
Alan Perlis once said: "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing"
1/ but there is little that keeps people from posting listings on multiple auction sites either.
Well, except for the fact that you are contractually bound to sell the item only once!
2/ Of course all these companies will swiftly shift to a Napster-like network when the law is passed.
Not so. These networks exist because there was something that Napster was inherently lacking - privacy. And these networks will continue to provide that, because the RIAA/MPAA won't be able to sue to receive personal information if no law is being infringed. So anyone who wants to trade files anonymously will still use these networks.
3/ What does Google do, exactly? They index what is already present, leveraging existing protocols and content. They will leverage what Gnutella/Kazaa/&c. currently present unless there is more money to be made otherwise. While it is possible that they will create their own filesharing system, I consider it doubtful they will.
But of course, only time will tell. And if compulsory licensing (which makes so much sense!) does come through, it will be a huge win for consumers, no matter who provides the medium for distibuting it.
Mattcelt
Right now all compulsory licensing deals actually involve money. Radio stations pay money to play songs. Sure the compulsory license means they don't have to make a deal with each artist and record company, but there is still a non-zero fee involved. Any P2P compulsory licensing will involve some sort of fee (per download, per month, per something) and a system to collect that fee along with reporting what that fee was for so the money could make it back to the record company. In a P2P world like that no one is going to want to share files and bandwidth. It's one thing to give away files and bandwidth for free as part of a community, but if all your bandwidth and files are making a bunch of other people money I doubt your going to be so happy about it. The only thing compulsory licensing could do is create better versions of PressPlay type services. It is not likely to even apply to P2P as we know it. It would effect things like Apple's iTunes though, in ways they might not be so keen on. Unless that compulsory license involved a $1/track fee. In any case I don't see Google getting into this. It's not a search business, it's a content provider business. Which of course is why all the current P2P software companies are running on borrowed time, they have no content and no money to host it even if it was licensable. While they might think they can work out a model where uploaders are paid from the fees the downloaders pay(thereby giving people a reason to offer files) I doubt there is a company on earth that could handle all the tax issues making every uploader a small business would entail. Not to mention all the other issues involved in quality control and correct reporting of what the file was. The future of compulsory licensing is a bunch of businesses not in the P2P field but more like PressPlay and Apple. They host content, they charge for that content. If Google wanted to get into that I'm sure they could but I don't see it happening.
Lets say that companies can go and centralize their networks - great, it will be much faster and efficient no doubt. But today the companies are not at risk any more, its the users! Users demand anonymity and centralized servers are far from it, the companies that will Prevail will be those who will give their users the best privacy they market can offer. So centralized networks will fail.
Dont just mail it - Maileet
Specifically, the problem of indexing the web is an extremely thorny one. There is a massive amount of content, almost none of which has any structure whatsoever, and much of which is of dubious interest (i.e. it's total crap). The page rank system used by Google is simply brilliant and deserves all the accolades heaped on it.
Indexing a bunch of MP3s is a much, much simpler problem. As the author of the article points out, Napster had this pretty much nailed years ago. So Google's technical advantage is definitely questionable. What about its deep pockets, market presence, etc.? Sure, this indicates that Google might be a contender in this theoretical new market, but there are a couple of other companies out there with brands, deep pockets, etc. Say IBM, or eBay, or Amazon, or Microsoft, or Yahoo, or... okay, you get the point.
To me this article is a perfect example of attracting attention by taking a superficially intriguing stance, basing it on today's much-hyped company to gain topical interest. Upon examination, the conclusions of the article don't hold water.
Peer Pressure
Gnutella and its ilk are a nightmare on searching. They consume an awfull lot of bandwidth on the protocol not on the actual exchange of files. For the moments that is how its got to be. But it is not efficient.
Oh and filesharing is legal people. It is copyright violation that you can at the moment be sueed for.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I mostly support the EFF. But when they started promoting compulsary licencing, I decided not to support them. Perhaps they should revamp their support structure, such that if you donate money, you can direct it to a specific cause. And in such as way as the causes you *don't* believe don't indirectly benefit (by sharing the same overhead expenses, etc.) I'm not going to waste a penny on an organization that promotes ideas completely contrary to what I believe in.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
this author in this article has flawed reasoning. if compulsory licensing was ever introduced, a whole slew of companies would get into the game (search engines, p2p companies, M$, etc.) so the victor in the wars is hard to predict. i do agree p2p companies would have to modify their business plans, but i believe compulsory licensing would present as many opportunities as challenges....
smd4985
The filesharing services would start differentiating themselves with new functionality etc.
Some would die as happens with all markets with too much overall supply. While I agree that the majority of people would flock to fewer services, niche markets would exist just as they do right now in the music industry.
The problem is that the cost of entering the music distribution market would drop considerably. Therefore you would see MORE services, not fewer, with each catering to market segments.
The reason why compulsory license is opposed by the RIAA and their members is because it just legalizes exactly what they are trying to prevent: loss of control of music distribution.
Thanks for linking to Google. Probably nobody reading this would have been able to find it otherwise.
Suppose one had a GoogleNut tool. You query Google for a song. Google then distributes this Query to all of its distributed servers and on each one launches a Gnutella/Kaaza search, then replys with the a link that when activated uses your Gnuttell app/plugin to download the file from the location it found.
the Added value here is that 1) google's network would act as a fast bridge across the mostly small-world Gnutella networks. 2) they could cache simmilar requests 3) they could also develop lists of nodes to block if they detected RIAA style hanky-panky (e.g. different file sizes or fingerprints).
Since this mightbe more expensive than a regular search for Google, they could pay for it with say ultra-mercials while you download or make it a fee for service.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Network effects will bring one party to the top, as is already happening. Kazaa is not the best p2p app, but the most used and therefore most people use it. If legal changes make it possible again to have a central database, Kazaa is still in the best position to capitalize on that, because most people are still using Kazaa for downloading stuff.
Of course Google is bigger, but Google is bigger than eBay too and as the article states, eBay is the biggest auction site because of the same network effects. People go to eBay for auction searches and to Google for general searches, just as they go to Kazaa for music searches. If I type in the name of a song in Google, lots of results will appear, not just the mp3's.
It doesn't mean Google couldn't go after this market. If they would, they would stand a pretty good chance of winning, but so would Microsoft or Yahoo.
more from Douwe Osinga
On the other hand, Google is a practical expression of the maxim "information wants to be free". Being able to find out where to get information is exactly the opposite of all "intellectual property" laws, whose purpose is to limit the people's access to information. If compulsory licensing comes into effect, how long until one is automatically charged a fee each time one looks into a website?
Slashdot is a P2P network. Every message put here is just as much copyrighted as the latest hit by Stupid Band of The Week, or that eBook you want to get your hands on.
Compulsory licencing will end up being a tax on speech.
Big Brother Bush is doubleplus ungood.
And still the bandwidth (and processing power) you need for running the central database is quite expensive (note: that's why you can't compare bittorrent to napster, it just isn't centralized in the same way, and it solves the big-expensive-central-server problem.). Decentralized networks (including bittorrent following the reasoning above) are the only possibility way to do filesharing organized only by hobbiists, and that's why they will prevail.
Well, that is the point of the article. Once compulsary licensing allows anybody to setup bittorrents (however that is going to work), Google will win out. Distribution will be done through bittorrent, searching through Google. Kazaa with its smart tricks of hiding the central server will have no place to go.
Particularly I remember altavista was very well known and respected for their search engine. Then Google took over and dominated.
The long-time "near-monopolies" like Intel, Windows are the exception, not the rule. Remember the GFX industry? 3dfx were king, head and shoulders above the rest. Then came nVidia, and suddenly dominated. Now, ATI is providing very competitive alternatives.
Even my mom (who doesn't use a computer except to read the web at work) has asked me about Google. Though I had to tell her the internet address was www.google.com, couldn't find that on her own...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The guy who wrote the article does understand end-users.
Who is going to win is not the one with better technology. Technology is not important to the end-users. The user interface and convenience is what matter.
Why do you think that Kazaa is more popular that Gnutella. That's because the search engine is more convenient... You can search meta data in addition to filenames. The underlying protocol or matching engine has nothing to do with it.
Anyway, if I search for "Evanescence" music files, even the most crappy search engine will yield good results (especially if sorted by the number of hosts who have it - automatic google ranking!)
The one who are going to win are the ones who are going to make filesharing part of their OS or services. The winner will be Microsoft, Apple, and maybe AOL could be a distant second (in the MS space).
The article seems to suggest file sharing is illegal. It isn't. Infact by creating this reply I've shared a file with slashdot. OH NO - LOCK ME UP! Sharing copyrighted files may well be illegal, depending where you are, but anonymous distributed filesharing (Freenet et al) make is near impossible to police. And of course, filesharing is a global activity; There are no border patrols and you don't need a passport. So the difference any new US laws or licensing will make is... zero Give up, go home and have a bud. But NEVER feed the lawyers
You might find EncSpot helpful for sorting on one axis--quality of encoding method.
Java: the COBOL of the new millenium.
That all the file sharing companies are doing it because they believe it is the right thing. After all, isn't the whole idea of file sharing that software should be for everyone and not just for a select few that can afford it? And isn't it true that most of the file sharing software that were mention are themselves bases off of open source code, further perpetuating the concept of free-trade?
This sig was generated by a barrel of trained kittens for SeXy_Red (550409).
Also you might want to check out MusicBrainz. This worked really well for my collection.
Peer Pressure
The most information I could find about this is:
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The upcoming Killing... reissue, which will reportedly not include MEGADETH's cover of the Nancy Sinatra classic "These Boots Are Made For Walking" after the original writer of the song, Lee Hazelwood, refused to grant the group the rights to re-release the track, will contain an as-yet-undisclosed "big surprise", according to the frontman. (http://www.angelfire.com/fl2/wvummetalshow/oldne
The original version was originally released on CD without 'These Boots' due to Lee Hazelwood's delayed decision to be a right bastard. Megadeth had to increase royalties to him or drop the track. The later was chosen, the 7 track version was released and many fans never got to hear it. However, Combat Records (the bands label at the time) have since rereleased the album with the full original uncensored mix of 'These Boots' in its rightful place on track 4. (http://www.lastlabyrinth.com/reviews/revew29a.ht
The one big change on this rerelease is the band's phenomenal cover of "These Boots", originally made famous by Nancy Sinatra. After its release, songwriter Lee Hazelwood was offended by Mustaine's hilarious reworking of the lyrics, and eventually forced the band to issue later prints of the album without the song. It appears for the first time on CD here, but in a surreally censored fashion, since Hazelwood still has yet to grant permission to Mustaine to release the cover in its complete version. So instead of hearing all the lyrics, all the naughty bits are "bleeped" out. (http://www.popmatters.com/music/reviews/m/megade
However, it appears unlikely that the reissued album will include MEGADETH's cover of the Nancy Sinatra classic "These Boots Are Made For Walking", which appeared on the original version of the CD, after the original writer of the song, Lee Hazelwood, refused to grant the group the rights to re-release the version of the track that appeared on Killing..., seeing as it contained slightly altered lyrics to the original, thereby requiring Hazelwood's consent. "Sadly, we were forced to make a decision," Dave stated in his posting. "Do we put 'These Boots' on as an instrumental, do we sing it again in the original format with his lyrics, or do we just beep out all of my lyrics that I added? I decided for now, not to have it on the record if it means that we have to censor ourselves to appease this person. I have also written a statement about what happened, and why it isn't on the record, for inclusion in the liner notes. (http://www.blistering.com/news/newsdet.php3?ID=2
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
The author is wrong, because there is no lock-in effect. Ebay, which is cited as an example, has a lock-in effect because with buyers and sellers, each additional buyer or seller increases the total pool available to each other. Ebay creates the lock-in effect by acting as a middle-man.
There is no such lock-in effect for a filesharing service. A company like google can simple mass-burn CDs, or auto-download mp3s from elsewhere on the net and analyze them automatically for quality. If they can put catalogs online by the hundreds or thousands, they can certainly manage mp3s, given they are fully digital.
An example of a company that DOES have a lock-in effect is Lending Tree. Again, like Ebay, they act as a middle man, in this case between lenders and loan consumers. The more banks they have, the more choices consumers have and the more likely they are to want to see LT's deals. The more consumers they have, the more potential business that pool represents, and so they are more likely to attract banks. (And that's why they were bought out, since it was becoming clear they had passed the critical mass point for that lock-in effect)
There is no middle-man after compulsory licensing. There will be some services will all music on them. You'll D/L whatever you want. So it's traditional competition to attract customers.
The rest of us don't get government protected handouts when technological advance makes our skills obsolete.
We don't rue the loss of the welder's job, the steelworker's job, the woodworker's job, the craftsman's job, the accountants job, when a machine makes it unnecessary.
So, why all of a sudden does an INDUSTRY deserve protection. You don't need to have an industry to distribute music anymore, and you don't need to have a select few artists be turned into mega stars. Now, everyone's opinion, art, and songs can be pushed out there.
Napster, Kazaa, the web, just reflect a basic economic reality. The supply of content is infinite and so the value of the commodity is zero.
Being in favor of copyright laws in the digital age is like trying to bring back the horse and buggy. Being in favor of the "intellectual property era" is like trying to where the catholic church was right before they had this thing called the renaissance.
We are now going through a second renaissance. So far, American industry seems hell bent on trying to stop it. It ain't the Terrorists that will sink the United States. It will be the gradual realization that intellectual property is absurd and that trying to enforce this artificial monopoly on the world is morally wrong.
This is my sig.
So the article says that Gnutella et all are shooting themselves in the foot by trying to legalize music file sharing. I think he is operating under a bad assumption. He assumes that everyone that makes p2p software is doing it because they want to get rich.
He is missing an important point. A large number of people that make p2p software do it because they want to be able to share music on the internet. That's it. That's the motivation. That ability is riches enough. Screw the money.
i don't like my old sig.
They should come up with a consumer license. This license would allow a home user to download the songs they wanted and they would not be breaking any copyrights. The RIAA could charge $5 USD per month for this license. With an estimated 60 million Americans downloading files, that would generate 3.6 Billion USD per year! This doesn't even count the rest of the world that would bring this number into the tens of billions USD per year. They would be making FAR more money then they do now. This would also allow users to choose the way that THEY want to download music without all this DRM crap, OS/software requirements or copy protection. The file sharing services that offer the best features would rise to the top. If the RIAA would let me run thier organization for one year, I would bring in SO much cash they wouldn't know what to do with it. People love music and are willing to pay a FAIR price for it, on their terms. However, people are not willing to live with price fixing and over priced music and worse of all to be painted as a criminal for listening to music.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
We can all imagine problems with this scheme- the overwhelming financial success of pornography is the only the most cringeworthy of the drawbacks. But I can imagine a nation experimenting with this scheme, if various controls are added to keep it "clean". Of course that leads to ways for the gov to softly censor creative thought, by withholding funds on obscenity grounds...
This would be the system that P2P United lobbyists will prefer, as it gives their companies a reason to get paid in the future. Somebody has to monitor what files are duplicated, and transfer the set-fee to the deserving author, and some Napster-like system could handle the job. Oddly enough, this shift responsibility for punishing unauthorized filetrading to Kazaa.com and its ilk- users are only allowed to trade through official channels, so passing files by email or floppy-disk will have to be punished!
The funny part about this style of licensing is that once the system gets established, it'll look just like a mature, micropayment economy. Listeners download from Kazaa, Kazaa records what they took and each month prints out some cumulative paperwork: a bill for each subscriber, and a check for each musician. They'll take on exactly the business niche that micropayment middlemen want to occupy.
First- I've read repeated comments here and elsewhere asserting that Gnutella clients are hell on bandwidth. Mine (which has been running, excepting upgrades, constantly for over three years) uses less than one kilobit/sec of bandwidth for searching and protocol overhead. I've tried other networks and have not seen any of them do as well.
Second- I've never had a searching problem. Once my client gets a good position in the network I never fail to get around 25 responses/sec from usually all save one of my directly connected peers. Anything I've spent any time at all searching for I've found and been able to aquire so long as I have the patience to wait 1-6 hours for it dependant on file size.
Third- decentralized networks _are_ useful to outsmart "dimwitted judges", but vastly more important are the advantages of redundant storage and independence from the vagaries of centralized index servers. See the freaking definition of the "Internet" for more.
Fourth- I share and download open content, most specifically episodes of MST3K, whose most excellent copyright owners have encouraged their fans to share their content since p2p networks were pure s/f. Someone is going to have the rank temerity to charge me, not only for my bandwidth, but also for the right to share content which I paid for years ago when I subscribed to Comedy Central, whose copyright owners have given blanket permission to reproduce? As my esteemed parent post noted, it is copyright violation which is illegal, not filesharing. I find it hard to credit that the EFF would confuse the issue as their compulsory licensing proposal seems to have done. Their section heading "Making P2P Legal" is very bad spin for a group which proposes to be defenders of digital freedom.