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PC Mag Reviews Mercora P2P Radio
prostoalex writes "PC Magazine reviews Mercora peer-to-peer streaming radio. It's not a service which allows anyone to download songs, however you can listen to any of the top 20 million plus songs available on the network from more than 2000 private radiostations. Mercora supports keyword search by genre, song name or artist name, but does not allow to listen to more than four songs from the same artist to avoid copyright issues. Any Mercora user automatically becomes a broadcaster, when the app scans the drive for digital music and then suggests creating an ad-hoc Internet radiostation."
I just downloaded and installed Mercora and as soon as I did, my Microsoft Antispyware flagged Grokster as trying to install. Just a bit or warning.
According to the article, they pay the royalty fees, although it doesn't say where the money is coming from. Hmmm....
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
MPAA will get their share after Mercora has collected information on all the mp3's the users share + their IP adresses and forwarded this information to the hordes of lawyers that MPAA has harnessed for their newest try on busting mp3 distributors. You have been warned!
So basically we can now choose between 3000 random users random 10-song playlists streamed over inadequate bandwidth without the ability to find any songs beyond the typical top-40 songs, or to save them. Add to that weird claims of legality, and privacy concerns from the scanning of the harddrive, and it suddenly doesn't sound so nice anymore. Not that it did sound any nicer in the first place. Most p2p apps already suck, making it even more artificially restricted doesn't really help.