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Kazaa Backs Plan To Bill P2P Music Transfers

Posted by timothy on from the revenue-stream dept.

Darth Coder writes "From this article at The Age: Kazaa has thrown its weight behind a plan to start billing song swappers for their music downloads. The idea is to phase in a billing mechanism for peer to peer networks, such as Kazaa and Morpheus. Initially payments would be by credit card, but in the future downloads would be automatically detected and a charge added to the monthly internet service provider bill."

4 of 388 comments (clear)

  1. talk about shooting yourself in the foot. by Delphix · · Score: 5, Insightful

    and thus endeth Kazaa.

    If they did that, how long would it be before another network popped up to replace them? Hours? I guess they forgot they aren't the ones who invented P2P...

    I guess they also don't realize people use the network....because it's... free... Not free and it will go away.

  2. Why Share by Aoverify · · Score: 5, Insightful

    P2P file sharing apps work for just that reason. People sharing on their own free will.

    What is the reason to share if you are paying for downloads?

  3. Stay Away From My ISP Bill by istartedi · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Ummm... someone gets a virus on my box, then convinces my ISP that I dowloaded a whole bunch of crap, then I get a huge bill, then I have to prove I didn't download?

    No Thanks.

    If that's going to work, the ISP had d*** well better be sure they are filtering packets on a per user basis, so that I can't download anything through the Kazaa port unless I really am a registered Kazaa user, and they had better make sure that if "I" try to do that they flag it as a virus and not a new signup or something. No other way.

    Look.

    The ISP billing right now is "pure". I get billed for connectivity and that's it. The last thing I need is for my connection to turn into something like the POTS line, where kids in the house could "dial" the equivalent of a 900 number.

    --
    For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
  4. How is this any better...? by YouHaveSnail · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How is this any better than buying your music straight from a web-based service like the iTunes Music Store, PressPlay, etc.? At least with those services, you have some assurance that you're getting what you pay for. With Kazaa and other P2P services, you don't really have any idea what you're getting or even who you're getting it from. Nobody cares much right now specifically because you're not paying for the stuff you download, but that'll change when the download costs you a buck and the quality turns out to be crappy, or when the file ends up being something completely different from what you wanted.

    Anonymous P2P file swapping cannot support a pay model unless there's some way to trust the people you're swapping with. I can think of two ways to do that: 1) something like PGP's web of trust concept; 2) some sort of centralized system for rating users the way eBay does. But PGP's web of trust doesn't really seem to have taken off in any big way, and a centralized authority negates a lot of the advantages of P2P in the first place.

    Frankly, I don't think that the record companies will go for this either, since there's no mention of DRM, and they have no assurace that you'll actually get what they produce instead of some modified version which they can't control and which might make them look bad.