Slashdot Mirror
LegalTorrents Offers CC Works Via BitTorrent
An anonymous reader writes "A site called LegalTorrents has just launched that hosts trackers and seeds for digital media licensed under the Creative Commons license. ('We distribute content with the full permission of the rights holders and use the peer-2-peer file-sharing technology called Bittorrent.') The site even provides a way to donate money to artists you like. (LegalTorrents takes 15% off the top unless you are a member, which costs $50 one-time during the beta period.)" It's always good to see "legitimate" content distributed in ways that make it hard to demonize the distribution system itself — something Lawrence Lessig in particular has been doing for years, and his book "Free Culture" is one of the audiobooks available through LegalTorrents. Note that LegalTorrents has been around for a while now, rather than "just launched," but the current beta period won't last forever.
This post is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license version 3.0.
If the site becomes popular enough , it gives exposure to the artists.
There, that was not so hard to figure out.
15% isn't all that outrageous when you consider that the credit card and banking fees are included in that total. They are providing a value-added convenience... you don't have to track down the artist's site, the artist doesn't have to contract with a payment service, etc.
Plus, since it isn't mandatory, I'd say this is a perfect example of the free market at work. Unlike, say, the record company system where the only way to compensate the artists is through their record company. May the best distribution model win! If people don't like this, it will go away :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The name of the tracker indirectly spreads the notion that other torrents are inherently less legal. It's a content distribution platform. Much like with firearms, it's the people that use it that commit or don't commit crimes. Not the tools they use.
Other trackers are full of CC and open source contents as well. Just do a search for gentoo, ubuntu, slackware or some such on the pirate bay and you'll see what I mean.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Right, you're always able to freeload off LegalTorrents in order to find and download the music you like, and then you can always donate to the artist separately if you so choose, and then LegalTorrents ends up having to foot the bill for their servers (however minimal it may be).
So in order to recoup the costs of all the freeloaders, they have to charge the good samaritans 15%.
We released our album Politics Apocalypse online recently, including on LegalTorrents. It is available free to download. Licensed with the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. This licence lets you use this music for commercial products or make remixes or other derivative works, so long as you give credit to the original artists. Politics Apocalypse is political and subversive post-industrial rock with an interesting mix of classical instruments, guitars, electronic beats, and a small dash of aussie hip-hop. You can download the whole 11 track album at no cost at our website. We are also doing a name your own price CD (starting at cost price). http://www.politicsapocalypse.com/
If we REFUSE to give any money to the people who put effort into publicizing artists, music might as well as be dead. I don't buy the record studio's argument that we need them, but in their absence the grassroots movement needs some funding.
If you are too cheap to tack 15% on top of your donation, just go to the artist's page and donate directly.
LegalTorrents do provide a seed also. We accept donations directly from our site but yeah if they manage to get someone to donate through their site I don't really mind giving them 15%. As I stated in my other post we have our music there.
15% is kinda expensive considering they don't do much
Whatever. I'd like to see random Slashdot dudes build a website that is still up and responds in under a second through a holiday-weekend front-page Slashdotting, attached to a storage system built to scale out to terabytes of hosted data with dedicated BT seeds, integrates several different programming languages and toolsets, supports multi-file uploads over the web with full Unicode support, has a Facebook app, backups, load balancing, memcached, and on top of all that also aims to build a community of real people who support and give their time and energy to help build it because it's such a cool idea.
Go for it, really. Maybe in your spare time.
I know some of the people building this... and they are working their assess off
15% is not a bad 'payment' for a seed that will be there as long as the torrent is available.
If the site becomes popular enough , it gives exposure to the artists.
There, that was not so hard to figure out.
Bingo!
And folks, it does (potentially) far more than that - it proves that the RIAA is out of their mind when they claim that P2P software is only for illegal sharing. It proves that software, like any other tool, is not necessarily good or bad - how it is used determines that.
If this site makes it and becomes popular, it is perfect proof that the laws that the **AA are lobbying for are really for getting/keeping control over online media - and not about piracy.
Of course, the **AA's next step will be trying to pass a law ensuring that royalties and profits for these types of services go to one of their organizations (like SoundExchange) for them to control funds distribution (ie: the **AA keeps the money - just like the recent Internet Radio bullshit that passed).
But, that's a few more miles down the road - first, this site (and similar sites) must prove that BitTorrent can be and is being used for legal purposes to help prevent the **AA (and others') attempts at laws making P2P software illegal.
Oddly, someone above posted about the upcoming "accidental" attack on this service by the **AA - and was modded OffTopic... dunno why. I surely wouldnt doubt that such a thing will occur, and I definitely find it on-topic to a discussion about LegalTorrent offering legal BitTorrent downloads - as such a situation would potentially cause two issues directly related (assuming the **AA find open servers)... (1) LegalTorrent would be "offering" illegal torrents, and/or (2) LegalTorrent wouldnt be offering anything once the **AA's server farm pummelled them into nothingness - just like they did to Revision3).
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