Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Grokster in Talks to Be Bought By Mashboxx

Posted by Hemos on from the potentials-to-be dept.

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.'"

2 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why P2P? by BewireNomali · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Apple has it right for a company that sells consumer electronics. they don't make any money off song sales. Therefore, this model is not appropriate for a music company.

    Ringtones sell for 3-5 bucks and sell pretty well. this suggests that songs are underpriced, or at least priced significantly less than the market will bear. To that end, it seems that Apple is artificially depressing the cost of music, to the detriment of music companies.

    I can't speak for allofmp3.com, but ITMS is probably a loss leader as opposed to a viable revenue generation model for sales of music.

    Record companies can't make money at a dollar a song. Peer networks would help because they kill bandwidth costs and presumably pass saving on to the consumer.

    --
    un burrito me trampeó.
  2. No DRM by drgonzo59 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    My problem is with DRM. I got some song of iTunes and I thought (I clicked through the agreement and what not) that if I buy the song I can play it anywhere like any other music file, especially on my Linux machine. Oh no! My windows drive died so I never reinstalled and am using Ubuntu, BUT I could not play the songs I payed for. Of course, I found out DVD Jon's site with his FairKeys and DeDRMS programs and removed the DRM from my songs, but I had to go through all that trouble to play songs that I already payed for!

    For me at least,the main advantage to iTunes was an accessible and convient way to download music and $1 is the price of convinience more than anything. I could go to any P2P network and find and download the music for free, but the time it takes usually is worth more than $1 (at least for me). So if there was a site that you can get your music in plain mp3 or ogg or other non-DRM-crippled format, I would pay $1 just to save time. I don't know how they can do it with a P2P network though, but the underlying mechanism doesn't matter as long as I can get my songs faster.