Kazaa Founder Wants Us To Find "Legitimate" Files

Just because I'm an writes "The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Kevin Bermeister and Michael Speck have been developing technology to return search results on file sharing programs that point to pay-for content from the copyright holders. The article reports that there are trials planned for Australian ISPs, with interest from elsewhere on the globe."

Comments

"legitimate" != "paid for"

[mcgrew]

Yahoo! had their music search, and I was incredibly disappointed that it simply refused to return any free (as in beer) content. A friend of mine (Joe Frew, I wrote about him in the old K5 Paxil Diaries) had another friend host dozens of his original songs, I linked them from my (now defunct) web site, and you could not find these MP3s on any search engine!

Google is just as bad, even though they're getting better; tha last time I searched "Huckleberry Finn" (in the public domain) the first three hits were Amazon and the like. This is IMO incredibly shoddy.

There are literally thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of songs out there in myriad places whose artists WANT you to hear.

Trying to sell bits is insane, actually "buying" bits is even crazier, as crazy as buying a bottle of water when there's a perfectly good drinking fountain handy. Don't sell bits, sell the medium that stores the bits! If you're a band, sell tickets and merch and use your bits to make fans.

Nobody talented ever starved or was forced into another profession from copyright infrinegent, but many talented folks have starved or been forced out by obscurity.

BTW, there are thousands of FREE MP3s, OGGs, SHNs and FLACs on archive.org. If Kazaa's founder wants to go legit, he should make a service that allows us to find the truly free songs. If I want to hear the top 40 I'll just turn the radio on.