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Music Industry Develops Centralized File-Sharing System
pearljam145 writes "A new file-sharing standard designed to distribute copyrighted music and movies legitimately has been developed by a technology consortium. The system could deliver any content format to any computer, and users might even earn rewards points for sharing the files. Using the new standard, computer users could share small files containing information about music, video or other data, but not the content itself. The Content Reference Forum (CRF), founded by Universal Music Group backed by technology companies including Microsoft, is hoping the sharing file standard will be adopted by technology companies and incorporated into software music players."
...can be downloaded right here in a zipped PDF. There's an XML Schema on the last page of the "Core Specification 1.0".
The Army reading list
From two days ago?
its called usenet. and people share huge files there anyway. if this catches on little jimmy is going to be learning about tar archives pretty quickly.
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
so... this program will help me correctly fill in the ID3 tags of all my MP3's? Thanks :)
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
What's the point of this if I can't actually share the content itself? Why would I want to share a description only?
They want me to host the files that will link to their servers and get them paid! This is nothing more than a distributed bandwidth reduction process. In return you get these imaginary points with no cash value. This isn't file sharing people, this is bandwidth redistribution.
I basically end up hosting 'links' on my computer that point to a pay-as-you-go service.
Essentially, I offer spam on my file sharing connection to other users.
Because each file has meta-information about myself, perhaps I can earn 'bonus points' and get free credit to download the latest Britney Spears single.
A simpler model of this system would be "we'll pay your for legitimate e-mail addreesses of your friends to whom we can send corporate spam."
The article is light on details, but as a business model I think this is one of the worst I've read about in months. The value proposition is so low I can't see anyone participating in this.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
So now I can send you a small file that will allow you to get an album or movie after you pay for it. Exactly how is this different from me linking you to say amazon with my referer number?
Sure if you can get a lot of people to take note of your recommendations you could make some money perhaps but this type of stuff has existed for years.
Oh well. NEXT
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Ontday alktay about usenetbay!
once again, they clearly demonstrate their non-grasp of the file sharing concept, and for this target market's desires and needs.
*Bzzzt* Sorry, try again please.
How about a closed P2P network that you pay a monthly fee to access via secure clients, and that network would have actual files that you could download? Nah... too simple. *rolls eyes*
Is the juice worth the sqeeze?
Haven't we learned that centralized file sharing isn't a good idea? This'll get shut down by the music industry in no tim-- oh, never mind.
The real story was written by Will Knight of the New Scientist news service, for the record.
Come on now... Or was this just an amazing use of plagerism to illustrate the point in a story about fair use rights and legal music sharing (note that quoting verbatim half the story without attribution is not fair-use, at least not in the US)?
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
It really just looks like they've found a way that they think will work to reduce their advertising costs.
This does not address in any way the real problems of the music industry, the copyright issues and the like, but has been hyped recently as exactly that - probably to distract the public attention from those issues.
Step 1: Create a really stupid P2P system.
Step 2: Convince Congress to outlaw everything else.
Step 3: Profit
If you RTFA, you'll see it's not about content sharing it's about advertising sharing. Users can share information about the content, but not the content itself. This is a non-event.
Imagine your ultimate stereo system. Don't be bashful - if it's really the ultimate, it should include a music library containing every piece of music ever recorded, and a program which can use your past music preferences to suggest new pieces of music for you to listen to. It would be an incredibly mind-expanding device, and one which is technologically not far off - but the introduction of the personal music library will likely be delayed by a decade or more because of copyright problems.
Electronic magazines; special interest news programs which are compilations of the most interesting articles from diverse sources; computer program libraries so programmers don't have to reinvent the wheel; information devices such as an encyclopedia you can wear as a pair of earrings - all of these things would be made much easier and less expensive by the elimination of copyright.
If we abolish copyright, it will be much harder for authors and performing artists to get paid. Absolutely true. Some will say this is a fatal objection. I disagree strongly.
Sometimes changes in technology lead to changes in the economy. The invention of the steam shovel put a lot of ditch-diggers out of work. And the advent of the information age is going to make it impossible for authors to retain strict control over the distribution of their work. Should we then pass laws to try to allow authors to regain that control? Absolutely not. If the authors find life more difficult in the information age, that's the way the cookie crumbles.
As it turns out, though, the information age contains more benefit than harm for authors. The process of getting published becomes as easy as pressing the 'return' key, and anyone can participate. The result will be to make the authorship process much less elitist.
We still have a challenge: how can we arrange for authors and artists to get paid? I agree that it's a challenge, but I think we're up to it. They could:
- get grants;
- hold an academic position where reputation counts;
- give live performances;
- market their recordings themselves;
- publish 'shareware';
- produce a new work and charge a publisher a moderate up-front fee for being the first on the market with the work;
- embed advertising in their work and distribute it widely for free.
We can also design alternative institutions to support artists - for instance:
- A 'book of the month club' which pays artists to contribute their work. True, without copyright you can't arrest freeloaders, but if the service is worth a lot and only costs a little, people will join it.
- People are willing to pay a little money to feel good. An on-line entertainment service which pays authors a small royalty and brags about it may be more profitable than one which doesn't.
But even if it becomes harder for authors to make money (and I'm not convinced that will be the case), the benefits to information consumers far outweigh the costs. And really, there's no other choice. The maintenance of copyright laws is just a finger in the dike. People familiar with computer technology understand that, in the computer world, "bits are bits." A piece of music, a book, a picture, a computer program - they're all just information, and the only technological way to prevent my copying any of them is to outlaw computers altogether.
It's way too late for these industries to be asking us to trust them at all. For the bulk of us, I'm sure that trust is gone for good.
This won't really do much to protect content. I think it'll be just like all other protection schemes -- subject to transcoding into a format that can be used (and shared) by anything.
--
Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken.
Points are given out based on how many people you can get suckered into paying to download a license for these files. Payments for getting friends and family to spend money on a third party product, how long until you get more points for getting them to also become a distributor. Tis nothing more than a pyramid marketing scheme. Pyramid schemes were once known for things like filter queen and herbalife. Perhaps we should call this marketing program "needalife"?
If they were being honest about they could just market to the masses with commercials and have honest downloads like itunes or the like. Instead they are trying to get the masses to go astroturfing on their behalf. Expose this for the lie that it is.
I don't think there's anything wrong with /., I think everyone is just sick and tired of hearing about the poor music industry losing their iron hold on creativity. Boo hoo. At least they finally realized that they can't sue us into their way of thinking. Too bad it's too late, unless they've received SO much bad publicity that it perpetuates their evil empire through fear rather than genuine market profit. Bye bye, RIAA, we won't miss you.
After reading the article, this appears to be nothing more than some kind of perverted searching application. Basically a user will search for content and see links that the user can then select to download the material after paying for it. They should save the trouble and simply pay Google to incorporate this into their search engine.
There needs to be some element of the music that can be sampled or shared -- and I mean for every single track on the system. The whole reason people have to share music illegally is because it's impossible to sample every track on an album without buying the album first. People are wise to the fact that a lot of the time, albums have one or two good songs, and no one's dumb enough to go out and buy an album like that without sampling it first. For this system to work, you need to be able to sample any and all tracks that you want, and to share those samples with everyone, and then get kickbacks if those shares are turned into sales... like an affiliate program.
wow, my brain is working today!
stuff |
I guess I don't get it. There has to be some value to the metadata in these files over and above what you can get from freedb (currently about 250MB compressed with about 1.1M CDs cataloged).
Otherwise, why would people want to host and share this information? Maybe they are going to give away the lyrics for free? Song snippets? Music video snippets? Somebody who has bothered to RTFA, please give us a clue!
-Rick
Apple has demonstrated that when you give people the choice to buy music in the form they want, and at a reasonable way, people will buy. There are no gimmicks in their offering, and you simply pay for what you want.
Today, when I walk into a record store and look at the prices of CDs, I usually end up not buying anything at all, not because I cannot afford them, but because I do not think I am getting value for my money. 18 dollar CDs with 2 or 3 songs that I really want, is not a good deal in my book.
I wonder if they'll ever figure it out ... sigh
All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be
You know what's really SO great about this proposed file sharing system?
What's so great is that it doesn't actually allow you share anything. OH . . . MY . . . GOD! SIGN ME UP!!!
Now i can make "metadatas" that say things like "Britney Speerz r0XX0rZ! sHe 0wnz j00! loolollllol!!1!!11! omgroflbrb!!111!!!1" and . . . and . . . OMG! i can SHARE these with all my friends!!!
and then, presumably, because they had that metadata, they would now have the permissions necessary to purchase her music from some online music store without getting to listen to it first! Man! I WISH that wal-mart worked that way, but they'll let just ANYBODY come in and buy music without listening to it first, or, or, they try to make you preview it on those nasty headphone things? ew?
And they don't even give you POINTS for it.
God, i love points. One time, i got like, a millions points on pac-man, and i almost creamed my shorts.
iTunes is so dead.
** Chigusaaa!!! You're the coolest girl in the WORLD!!! **
On the plus side, the music industry appears to be getting away from expecting that people will share their DRM'd files with no compensation. A reward structure in terms of merchandise or better access to the network is absolutely necessary for them to leverage a peer to peer network. Also, the music industry having been involved in these sorts of standards helps contradict the automatic demonization of any peer to peer network.
How long will it be before folks who use the service realize they can imbed links to free versions of the music in the metadata? For that matter, how limited is the metadata? How about an mp3 converted to a long ascii string inserted into the metadata, which can then be reconverted back into a binary mp3/ For me, I wouldn't mind paying per song to download quality material...I do believe that artists should be compensated for their work. What I don't understand is why so many of them DON'T jump off their label contracts and embrace the largest global market, with next to no production costs. Create music. Record music. Post music to website with shopping cart. Wait for money to roll in. Sure, the fabulously wealthy 'stars' probably wouldn't make as much money this way...but what about the folks that don't have a contract/label? Why not go straight to publishing? Hell, there are tens of millions of 'writers' out there in blogland publishing their own written works...
It suddenly occured to me to wonder what would happen if you actually put out a bad review about something. Do I really believe that these guys will assist in moving such negative information around? Somehow I doubt it.
if they had thought of this before they started prosecuting everyone in sight, then it would probably have worked a whole lot better
If I share a CD with a friend, part of that is because I want them to enjoy the CD and part of that is because they don't yet like the band enough to pay for the CD. A big part of trolling around on P2P apps is looking for new and unique music that you may not have heard of before, and certainly wouldn't be willing to pay for until you decided that you liked it.
On the other hand, what the Music Industry is offering, is a way to tell people what music is good, but not a way to actually show them. It's a form of becoming a mini-repository for links to available music... Music that the person thought was good enough to buy. In other words, popular music. While that idea is interesting and has at least some merit, why one would actually host such a thing on their personal machine and why other people would push for that standard is beyond me. Perhaps the idea was that someone should be able to share a file purchased from iTunes, and that other people in listening to a 30 second preview could decide if it was worth buying. But those people would necessarily already be on a file network where real files are shared. Why not just have a central repository... a great mall for music?
Ah well. A small group of programmers somewhere got a job doing this, and the RIAA is picking up the bill. I suppose worse things have happened.
The ______ Agenda
After that article about Steganography on FreeBSD awhile back, I think I finally found a use for it!
http://www.freedb.org/freedb_aware_apps.php - seems to be well supported aswell.
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
this is not content they are talking about putting on this sharing network. it is advertising - don't get the two confused!
the last ten years have seen the entertainment industry working very hard to blur the line between content and ads. people regard movie trailers as content, some in the movie industry are starting to regard the movies themselves as advertising (for merchandise like action figures and lunch boxes, which is where the big money is).
2 1337 4 u!
(AP) Paris - 12/12/2003 10:53 AM
Vivendi Universal today was among the host of media companies with record company subsidiaries reporting record profits for the third quarter. Jean-Marie Messier, CEO of Vivendi, attributed the stellar quarter to the company's partnership with the Napster Inc. Napster, a software program used to share and download music, started out as a way to pirate music, but turned legitimate in December 2000 with a broad licensing agreement between each of the five major record labels. Since that time, Napster has made agreements with 6 of the 7 largest US ISPs and OEM deals with computer manufactuers Hewlett Packard and Dell Computer to either install or give users the right to download music from the network. In the case of AOL and Earthlink subscribers, each customer pays an additional $10 a month to share and download from the network. In addition, deals with most of the top indie record labels have followed since 2000 giving Napster users the right to share and download those record label files from the Napster network.
"While we ceratinly were anxious at the beginning of the Napster "experiment", it has truly taken off. It is our hope that even more users will join the network, we are already seeing wonderful penetration in Europe." This past spring, Napster opened its gates to European users in one of the biggest product launches in history. "The network almost doubled the day we opened up to Europe. We are now seeing concurrent usage approaching over 500,000 users with nearly 100 Terabytes of files being shared on the network." explained chief technology officer Shawn Fanning. "With our improved distribution system, we hope to push on into Asia sometime in the 2nd quarter of 2004 once we reach deals with many of the labels there."
The success of the music industry stands in dark contrast to the rest of the economy which grew at an annualized rate of 1.2% this quarter while revenue among the five largest record labels was up 11% from last year. When questioned about Napster Messier replied "Napster has truly been an innovative product and has rewarded Vivendi shareholders and most other media company shareholders immensely."
if i could say anything to the music industry, i would say: "you want it all, but you can't have it! yeah, yeah, yeah."
here is the final solution:
1. entire music industry decides to represent music, not recordings. "recorded music is dead!" they finally cede, joining ranks of some of the best musicians in the world as improv artists. recording industry part of the music industry dies.
2. music industry re-assesses the value of the poor instrument makers, sound technicians, and studio owners who underpinned the recording industry the entire time. how to get them and musicians paid while leaving shared songs free?
3. for musicians, life doesn't change. musicians go to studios, record songs, and they are quickly copied to and shared on the internet for free. listeners find their favorite artists. artists gain popularity, recognition, and prestige. stardom lives on.
<fame> i'm gonna live 4evar!!!111!!!1!!!
4. ambitious people want the fame. they buy instruments, recording equipment (which is needed in the studio process and computers are still behind in that league,) music lessons, and pay sound technicians and executives a lot of money for advice (execs,) and ridicule (techs.)
5. the money of all of these sales goes to the recording industry. the musicians spend money to the music industry in order to invest in becoming famous. the songs are still free unless they sell recordings -- mass-producers are still willing to press albums, which would be dirt-cheap now that sharing is legal but only die-hard fans want to buy cd's, and low demand keeps prices pretty high, still several or a dozen dollars a disc.
6. the musicians want the money to come in where it has always been -- the gigs and tours. more popular musicians go on more tours and make more money. they are more popular by making better songs, which fans are familiar with and appreciative of because they got the songs for free off the internet. the music industry sells them bunches of road techs, architects, instruments and equipment to smash, anarchists, the works. industry profits and musicians rake it in.
7. a bardic way of life returns where touring isn't some 'hassle' for some lame-ass, half-ass musician in 'rolling stone'. touring becomes a way of life. music becomes magic. crowds become hordes and musicians make more money than they ever would have dreamed they could make. they are music industry's number one customers and music industry floats in the air on top of enormous profits coming in from the bardic class. music industry returns to the period of artisans and actually being good at producing musical instruments and equipment, rather than being cheap.
8. retrospectively, fans realize that the recording industry and its long, hard battle to survive was their own damn fault. they should have ditched recording music long ago. music played live, improvisationally in all forms, is living music. even the mp3 is dead. suddenly phish phans were before their time -- the fact that western civilization is all about entertainment dawns on the masses and exodus begins as people re position themselves geographically to be nearer to their favorite artists.
9. hippies don't know how to use birth control. the world population spins out of control and all the migrating nomadic anarchist hippies have too many children for the ecology to support. the world ends because issues of entertainment were more important to the most powerful and decisive nation in world history than even their own moral and eugenic principles. humanity fails. earth dies. life is snuffed out.
10. paul simon writes a lyric and philip glass plays a song to accompany the empty universe. paul mccartney dies. then any musician who ever spoiled the british crown by accepting a knighthood die, the savages.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Instead, horrendously inefficient "file sharing" systems are chewing up vast amounts of bandwidth.
It might pay for some Internet or computer company to buy out the music industry, just to get the overhead down. The entire music industry is considerably smaller than Compaq was, after all. At one point, Red Hat had a much bigger market cap than the entire music industry.
I can safely say that regardless of price (including free)or method of delivery, I'm not buying anything from Brittney Spears, 50 cent, Creed, or whatever "superstar" they have this week. Its not my music. And that is the fundamental flaw in their piracy argument: They are assuming that if it wasn't for file sharing I'd be buying this crap. Personally I stopped buying CDs in any real quantity in the mid-nineties - well before napster. I'm not going to start again anytime soon. Its still not my music.
iTunes and Napster 2.0 aside, I can understand why it's so difficult for the record industry to develop a truly unique offering that we would be willing to pay for: We can't even think of one and we are the target audience. There are still compromises in those services which we would love to do without (like proprietary file formats) and the selection needs to be significantly larger.
Perhaps, instead of trying to build a new service using existing content, we should build a new service for musicians and writers where they can post new works not belonging to a publisher and get paid by a subscription fee. If the content was worthy, people would pay. Eventually, it could become the method of choice for emerging artists, thus cutting off the record industry's supply. Or we can just keep downloading illegally...
--KS--A musician friend of mine once summed it up as "All the record industry is good for now is creating rock stars. And who needs more rock stars?"
Contain no content?
Someone ought to suggest them Write-Only Memory as a better solution to the p2p problem.
Timeo idiotikOS et dona ferentes
Lordy Lordy! Not more "rewards programs" involving "points" Everybody from the AMWAY corporation on through the whole credit card industry down to the WinnDixie Grocercy store has a friggin rewards program based on points where you can get "cool stuff" (crap I'd never buy at really bad prices) for points-(a point has some "value" associated with it that is rumored to be linked to a currency on a formula basis that when converted to real money is very very small.)
I don't have credit cards with "rewards" systems and I don't shop in stores with "rewards" systems. I want a good deal without having to get permission to participate in advance.
If that is the only way to get music in the future, I'll hum.
Creative Spelling Copyright (2002). May use without Persimmons
This is like trying to stop underage drinking by offering teenagers free O'Douls.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Nowhere in my post did I mention any justification for file sharing, and btw, I dont (and never have) done it.
What I am saying is that suing 14 and 15 year olds is not going to solve the problem, do you think it is? File sharing is wrong period; but price gouging by record labels is only making things worse.
All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be
Quotes from the first design specification:
while ensuring compliance of the appropriate commercial terms for a given consumer - while ensuring DRM is enforced on you.
Content Refference data package can capture such information as [] what is the technical environment of the consumer e.g., [] content protection methods - Your "technical enviornment" means Trusted Computing reporting what software you are running, in particular securely reports if your computer will enforce DRM.
There is a core set of functional requirements that the CR Architecture must meet in order to enable content refferences-based content distribution and commerces
The files only work if you have HARDWARE (architecture) that meets the following requirements:
content registration
The content is encrypted/locked to your specific machine.
expression and enforcment of rights and conditions for distribution or use of content
Trusted hardware with Trusted software that securely expresses (reports) its DRM enforment policies and that undrestands DRM enforcement instructions.
description of user context relevant to aquiring and processing content
Securely reporting your Trusted Computing hardware and software (context).
clearance of content related transactions
Making payment (clearance) of the purchase (transaction).
And that is just from the first 4 pages of the first secification document. The second document defines "Contract Expression Language". That is a laguage to define DRM rules. For example the language allows them to write a CONTRACT object where your Trusted Computer SIGNS a PROMISE that will GRANT you the ability to copy the song to a Trusted iPod on the CONDITION that you first meet the DUTY of making a payment to the copyright holder. The contract could demand a payment every time you play the song, or it could require a monthly payment ro "rent" the song.
Section 5.2:
1. This specification does not specify how and where the contracts expressed using the defined profile is enforced....
2. This specification does not define the root of trust or any trust model for that matter.
3. This speciication does not specify how trust is established or validated
Yeah yeah yeah, they are trying to claim that this has nothing to do with Trusted Computing - but #1 does expect the contracts to be enforced, #2 does expect a root of trust and a trust model to exist, and #3 expects the trust to be established and validated. This crap lives on top of Trusted Computing, it is a part of the Trusted Computing chain.
5.3 specifies the contracts must support OBLIGATIONS, PROHIBITIONS, and PERMISSIONS. In particular they must support An event that represents that a monetary payment is due. It must represent a fee amount and to whom it must me paid and how it must be paid.
Now here's their Big Idea. You buy one of these songs. You can then share this song on ANY P2P service or post it on any website. Anyone who downloads this song MUST BUY IT before they can play it. That purchase can include a payment to YOU for hosting, advertizing, and transmitting the file. You become part of the "value chain", you may get paid. The copyright holder could define a fixed commission to you, or he could allow you to tack on any payment contract of your own. YOU get to decide how much someone has to pay you for downloading the song from you.
This is their Big Idea. They are all excited about "Viral Marketing". Each person hosting a file on P2P is free advertizing for the song, each person hosting the file is offering them free bandwidth to send the song.
Don't get too excited about getting paid - that part is pure pyramid-scheme. You have to buy the music then hope a butt-load of people buy it from you. Ponzi would be proud.
THEIR PLAN ONLY WORKS AFTER THEY SHOVE TRUSTED COMPUTERS DOWN OUR THROATS. Anyone without a complia
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Or is the network just for works acquired by monopolies?
The standard looks like a big bad advertising service, it's funny that they even call this a P2P network. What about sharing other legitimate files too?
Candy-Coated Knowledge
If you read through the veil of marketting mumbo-jumbo, you can see what this really is. Basically, they are going to have a system like iTunes. You buy a song and have the rights to it. Now by using this CRF file, they are letting people think it's P2P [but not]. Secondly, this in the end helps out the music industry, without much benefit to the users.
To the music industry this idea has 2 functions. First it helps spread the word on particular music. [ie FREE ADVERTISING] It's viral marketting all over again. Secondly, it helps them reduce cost. Instead of building a search engine and maintaining the bandwidth to support the users similar to iTunes, they can piggy back off of other P2P systems and use the bandwidth of the users.
What they save in technical costs they pass a part of it back to the users through these "rewards."
In the end..this is just smoke and mirrors... Instead of all these gimmicks, why don't they just start moving towards the iTunes concept instead of fighting all the way. They are going to end up there eventually...it's time that they face the facts...
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
Essentially this is merely a new way to distribute banner ads, with possible discount points for spamming your friends. The freely downloadable files are merely promos with BUY buttons.
Strangely, the article does not mention at all that the content itself will be pay downloads. Who wrote this, the RIAA? Not that it's wrong to pay for something, but the article makes it sound like the industry is giving something away, which they definitely aren't.