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Kazaa Backs Plan To Bill P2P Music Transfers
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."
Indeed. We don't pay to listen to the radio. We won't pay to use Kazaa. To hell with them anyway. Kazaa is just a spyware riddled virus factory. I want Napster back the way it was!
How ya like dat?
This sounds a lot like the AHRA (Audio Home Recording Act), which added a surcharge onto the cost of tapes, divided among labels, songwriters and artists, under the assumption the blanks would be used to duplicate music.
I don't think you'll ever get people to pay for what they can get for free. Why would I pay $1 for what I can get for free three clicks away?
There is an interesting experiment going on where ex-members of Candlebox, (now KMHW) are giving away their next CD in return for label-like benefits ($$) by increased sales of their sponsors product. It's more like the sports model, where Shaq and Tiger make more money from Reebok and Buick than they do from their team/winnings.
Interesting alternative. But pay Kazaa though my ISP? Wouldn't that violate the "no internet taxes" law? Also, how would FTP, Usenet, and Freenet (among others) transfers be taxed?
It seems that what is happening is that labels are saying "hey this worked before, let's try it again!" Perhaps if more people considered new models like the KMHW one, taxing bandwidth would be unnecessary.
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
Doing something like this may persuade the RIAA to back off of Kazaa, giving them a year or more of safety from lawsuits, as they are "preparing" a pay per download service...
Defender of Microsoft and Communism!!!
The ISP would also need a cut from Kazaa, since they're taking a portion of the bandwidth hit.
If there's anything that raises my hackles a bit, it's the concept of building a business model on illegal behavior as a means of doing legitimate business down the road. That's the opposite of the way things are done in this country.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
It is apparent that we should start separating concerns as soon as possible. If we proceed along these lines, with a kazillion ad hoc contracts and agreements, everything is going to come in to a babelesque and screeching halt.
Time for a few RFCs.
Everybody should do one thing well. Music licensing companies do one thing well -- collect money and offer licenses. P2P services do one thing well, facilitate distribution of content and sharing of information.
I can conceive of a few things we could do to facilitate it.
Imagine a license server protocols for license servers, which are capable of tranmitting a license, song-by-song, that permits the licensee to receive from ANY party a file representing that song. Presumably, the licensee can be given a token and authentication means that a prospective filesharer can check, perhaps by interaction with the license server, which then permits the file-sharer to transmit that song at will.
Now, conceive of various ways to engage in lawful commerce of great tunes:
1) enhance p2p services to perform license checks, so that when a person seeks to receive a tune, it will first have to authenticate the right to receive it. now, p2p can operate completely legally and in the clear -- and evolve to provide whatever value it can; and
2) vendor servers, either on the web, or through applications like iTunes, can provide super-duper interactions with users, combining and putting together tunes and samples, and then sell the tune to a customer (if unlicensed, sell the license -- if licensed, perhaps charge a bit because of special quality encoding or whatever).
Thus, we can always check to see if all of our tunes are licensed, and we can always check to see if the recipient can get our license.
Clearly kinks should be worked out, but I would WAY prefer to see the internet community get together to figure out the right way to do this -- rather than see yet another distribution infrastucture built up to protect yet another ridiculous hunk of turf.
This approach should be VERY attractive to music sources, making it possible to collect real revenues almost immediately, and from a kazillion purchase sources, without worrying too much about technology or distribution, and without having to negotiate with each and every individual prospective vendor -- by making it possible to create lightweight music servers that comply with the law, we make it easy for everybody to get legal.
This would be a good thing.