Grokster in Talks to Be Bought By Mashboxx

Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "The Supreme Court's ruling in Grokster has driven the P2P company to enter talks with Mashboxx, 'an upstart that is attempting to establish a legal peer-to-peer music company, according to people familiar with the matter,' the Wall Street Journal reports. Mashboxx would let users sample free but charge for downloads. The WSJ adds: 'To encourage the file-sharing companies and their users to go legitimate, the labels are seriously considering dropping such claims, some record executives say. In fact, say people close to the talks, Grokster is negotiating a settlement with the RIAA. The RIAA and Grokster declined to comment.'"

Comments

Why P2P?

[garcia]

What I need someone to explain to me is why I should have to forfeit my upstream to a company for downloads?

If I'm paying I shouldn't have to share shit. It's not going to help w/the costs of the songs. If anything, the RIAA will want to increase the costs just so that there isn't anyone saying that P2P is acceptable (legal or not).

Apple and allofmp3.com have it the right way. Pay for the songs, download them w/o sharing, and be done with it.

People shouldn't be charged twice for shit. P2P was popular because it was free and no other reason.

Re:Why P2P?

[nEoN nOoDlE]

Ringtones sell for 3-5 bucks and sell pretty well.

keep in mind, people have thousands of songs on their hard drives, but only a couple of ringtones on their phones. The usage is not consistent so therefore the price can't be.

Record companies can't make money at a dollar a song.

Ridiculous. Record companies have been making money - and lots of it - at a dollar or less a song when the songs were on CD and tape. And at least the consumer got a hard copy of a product. In the case of digital music, it costs the record companies even less since there are no shipping, packaging, or production costs after the music is recorded.

Grokster?

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

Does anyone still even use Grokster?

Look to the upstarts

[highcon]

The new companies will be the ones who are able to make the new paradigm work. It will take a while to sort itself out, but soon a few companies will come around that do not base their entire business model on hyping physical copies out the door. I would be extrememly surprised if one of the established recording industry behemoths were able to make this transition; the bigger the organization, the greater the inertia.

Big Surprise...

[joshsnow]

an upstart that is attempting to establish a legal peer-to-peer music company

Well what a surprise

The recording industry reasserts control over the means of distribution, benefitting not the artists and the consumers, but the big recording companies who own the artists and control the consumers.
This is what happened with Napster and the end game for the RIAA and MPAA etc is to be controlling all means of distribiution of electronic media via the internet.

It's worked with DVDs and CDs to an extent.
If they lowered the price of albums and gave consumers what they want, maybe people wouldn't engage so much in illegal file sharing.

Re:Silly Names

[generic-man]

They sell microcomputer software. When they started, the term "computer" implied "mainframe," so "micro" implied that they sold software individual workstations.

It's not true that everything they've sold has been for microcomputers (BZZT WRONG XENIX! BZZT WRONG WINDOWS ADVANCED DATACENTER SERVER!) but software for micros is Microsoft's bread and butter.