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Peer Impact Signs 3 Major Record Labels
An anonymous reader submits "Three of the Big Four music labels have reached licensing agreements to provide their music to the soon-to-launch Peer Impact network, a peer-to-peer service that enables legal music file-sharing."
The next thing I know, someone will be telling me that speaking my peace in public is legal!
Kenny P.
Visualize Whirled P.'s
Are the files distributed on that network DRM'd somehow? If so that will doom it and give the RIAA more ammo for the "illegal P2P is killing us!" rant.
Trolling is a art,
Now There's Another Place To Get Your Jessica Simpson Fix, Legally
I sure hope they have better artist than this or you can count me out.
Agile Artisans
this isn't really 'sharing' as their press releases would have you believe.
It is 'sharing' as in sharing your bandwidth. You still pay for the download. Wurld Media gets a cut and so do the labels (and presumaby the artists).
The difference between something like this and iTunes is that they are going to try to sell it with the "p2p" sex-appeal to lure people in.
Since it is p2p, it will cut down on their bandwidth costs in a big way.
If the P2P protocol and/or client isn't superior to whats available (for 'free') to people, it won't fly.
If it IS superior, how long until we see a 'lite' version of their client that authenticates with an alternative server (or none at all) that gets widely distributed and used as a seperate and 'free' p2p network?
This one might be interesting.
..mork
If you're paying money to 'share', aren't you really buying rather than sharing?
It seems like they're bastardising the concept of sharing to exploit the term's popularity.
Sweet informative mod.
Can anyone provide a link that actually has some useful info on this subject? The three links in the post essentially tell me nothing about the new service. How much will it cost? How does it work? Can we get some useful info other than "new mystery service coming soon!!" Slashdot must be partnered with them somehow...giving them free advertising.
Peer Impact File sharing FAQ
Why is this news? It's just another commercial delivery system. Does using P2P somehow make it super sexy good? Thanks Tim. Not.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
...to allow a piece of software created by 3 of the "big 4" to run on their system?
You don't even need to be a tinfoil hat type to see that this is an extremely bad idea. I have no wish to be Pwn3d by the RIAA.
Can't wait to see what kinda packets people find this thing sending back to its masters.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
If I'm reading this correctly, this is a server-side addition that more or less bills you for downloading music through "normal" P2P networks -- normal as in ones with their software running.
And this is supposed to work, uhh, how, exactly?
Oh, and let me guess. You downloaded a bad rip and want a better one? Better pay up. Again.
In short: Nothing to see here. Move along....
"An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program."
Legal P2P file sharing? Where's the fun in that?
How will the music-sharing function of Peer Impact differ from peer-to-peer (P2P) sites and paid music download sites?
Peer Impact is a proprietary, patent-pending business model that will not be announced to the public until the Fall of 2004.
There are so many things wrong with this that I can't bear to go on...
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
From Pest Patrol http://www.pestpatrol.com/PestInfo/w/wurldmedia.as p#Overview
WURLD Media, Inc.
WurldMedia partners with StreamCast Networks, Inc., developers of Morpheus. A download of Morpheus will result in the installation of components associated with AtomWire and other browser helper objects. Components within a Morpheus installation will carry a variety of developer names within the code, including ESD Technologies, Inc., John Marshall, My Way, Summit Software Company, Wurld Media Inc., and XMLAuthor Inc.
That's like a highway where it's legal to speed, but takes you nowhere. That's like a legal drug, that doesn't get you high. That's like stealing your own stuff! Where's the fun in that?!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
--c'est tu--
This is a service, that in almost everyway, is simply another pay-for-download music model.
You login, you license a song, you download it (with DRM).
Here's the difference, I'm guessing:
It's P2P. You download it from someone else on the network. That person gets some sort of recompensation based upon outgoing bandwidth used for legally purchased downloads.
Thus, if you have 100s of gigs online (legally purchased), and you serve it out on a fat pipe, and its stuff thats indemand, you may find a portion of your 'costs' paid for by the service.
Might work. Depend on whether or not the bandwidth savings for Wurld Media result in cheaper prices per song.
I doubt it, personal. Don't think they'll go under iTunes, and it'll still be difficult to compete with free.
It's a neat idea, but its just TOO late. You have mature free filesharing networks, and it just isn't going to work to introduce not-free (as in beer) networks.
It's telling consumers: Here, I have a product, its just like the one you already have, but you have to pay for mine.
Right.
At least with iTunes&look-a-likes, you get instant access to the music you want. Pay-for-P2P is slow, requires searching for music you may want, and requires money? Worst of all worlds.
I guess it is legal, and for the small portion of the public of which the legality of music sharing is a big deal, this may matter. But that demographic is a small part of slashdot, and I'm betting that its an even smaller part of the world at large.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Seriously, if all the "shared" files aren't free, why should I help them by offering my bandwidth to their other customers?
It's a bit like if I went to a shop, bought a disc, and the shop gave me 100 other copies to distribute by myself to other customers.
Now I can pay money to receive music at a quality that's inferior to CD at a store that has a selection inferior to any city's music store *AND* as an added bonus incur bandwidth sharing costs as well as opening my computer up to exploitation with yet another app with sockets a-listening.
Where do I sign up???
The indie labels are exactly where they always were: indepdendent. They've had the right for years to make their music available in any form they want. Put it on the existing P2P networks, make it available to download through iTMS or another service, put it on their web site.
The big record labels have always had the marketing advantage. That's what makes them the big record labels. The indies' upside is that they can make any sort of music they want; the downside is that because they're not aggressively targeting the mainstream, nobody's ever heard of them.
I don't think this changes anything. If the indies want to be noticed they need to develop their own ways. They should be more flexible than the Big Four, not just piggyback on their successes.
I'm making the assumption that this uses DRM and is actually p2p. So how on earth could that possibly work?
Just a quick primer, DRM (at least in any existing form) is nothing more than public key encryption turned upside down. A private key is generated on your machine and the public key is sent to the server (in the case of itunes or napster v2). The public key is used to encrypt any files you "purchase" so that only the private key can decrypt it. So far so good, but that is just simply public key encryption. What makes it DRM is that the software attempts to "hide" your own private key from you, the rational being that if you can access your own key, you can decrypt the data at will and save it rather than letting the application place all kinds of restrictions on you.
If this seems like an incredibly ignorant and technologically weak idea it is only because that is exactly what DRM is.
So how do you pull something like that off in a P2P environment? Who handles keys? Who encrypts stuff and to whom? I can only see this working with a flat fee based system where everyone has access to everything which has been encrypted with the same key. Of course as soon as that one key is "found" (and it will be, it has to be in every player on the network), the whole system falls apart.
Details on this would be nice (and not too much to ask from a news for nerds site), right now there just seems to be empty marketing blurbs.
Finkployd
What a SCAM!
The only way that ANY legit p2p service/program can ever work is by charging a flat rate for 'all you can download'. Or at least have a two tiered system where the Billboard top 100 sells a la carte, but once a song falls off the top 100, it moves into the flat rate category. This is basically the model the movie industry uses. New films are exhibited in theatres for a premium price, but once their popularity starts to wane, they move to HBO and DVD. Also, lose the DRM! If you don't, your plan is doomed to FAIL. Someone will crack it anyway! Accept the fact that while some theft is inevitable, the majority will do the right thing and sign up. Besides, despite what you say in all your RIAA bullshit rhetoric, most of the people who download now wouldn't be buying the song anyway.Looks like they're going after the iTunes market and not the napster market.
Is there a difference? The only differences I see between iTMS and Napster are 1. Napster uses WMA+MSDRM instead of AAC+FairPlay, and 2. Napster also offers a streaming service for $10/mo. Is there another big difference? Or how are those two differences major?
Ok Chuck, I'll walk you through it step by step.
"This means you won't be able to steal music" - you cannot "steal" music. You can only commit copyright violations. Stealing music is impossible, unless you shoplift CDs. And even then, you're stealing the CDs, not the music. The music still exists.
"that artists worked so hard to produce" - you know, I actually know people who play music because they just like to. Odd, no?
"and music companies worked so hard to distribute." - Cost of a music CD, about 10 bucks. Cost of a Hollywood movie on DVD, about 15. But making a movie is orders of magnitude more expensive to make and market. Wanna know why? Here's why. The music industry is uniquely corrupt. And also incompetent. Are you sure you want these goons scanning your hard drive, even if you haven't done anything wrong? What if your name happens to be Usher, too?
"Woe is you!" - and woe is anyone who allows this band of barely legalized criminals into their affairs. Even with something as simple as a click through EULA.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The record company LOANS the artist $$$! Each artist has to pay back the label for all that marketing, engineering, etc.
Most bands starting out make NOTHING from their first few albums; the label gets it all!
Here's somethiung for you to read. Steve Albini has been in the business a LONG time, and is very well known and respected. I know him personally and he has something that very few others in the record business have: INTEGRITY!
Want to know the truth? read this:
http://www.negativland.com/albini.html
I prefer Gnutella.
Remember, it's the uploaders they go after... not the downloaders.
You'll be fine.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!