Kazaa Backs Plan To Bill P2P Music Transfers

Darth Coder writes "From this article at The Age: Kazaa has thrown its weight behind a plan to start billing song swappers for their music downloads. The idea is to phase in a billing mechanism for peer to peer networks, such as Kazaa and Morpheus. Initially payments would be by credit card, but in the future downloads would be automatically detected and a charge added to the monthly internet service provider bill."

Re:Not feasible

[CrosbieSmith]

A major problem with Kazaa is that it only hashes the first 32K of any file. Any glitches after that go undetected. This is why I won't be sorry to see Kazaa lose out to Overnet, or some other network which hashes the whole file.

Re:Not feasible

[1u3hr]

If there's anything that raises my hackles a bit, it's the concept of building a business model on illegal behavior as a means of doing legitimate business down the road. That's the opposite of the way things are done in this country.

No, it's exactly how things were done. In the 19th C the US didn't recognise foreign IP rights, to allow its industry to catch up with Europe. That included copyright, so authors like Charles Dickens were screwed by US publishers who just reprinted their books with no payment to him. Only when the US started to want to sell IP, that's when you got sanctimonious about "respecting" it.

Re:In Other news...

[updog]

The best p2p software I've tried is gift [sourceforge.net].

It's got a modular architecture - it's got different frontends (I prefer the ncurses frontent, it's very fast); and various backend modules (one for the Gnutella network, and even one for FastTrack, the Kazaa protocol).

Even if Naptser was still around the way it was originally, I would still prefer gift.

Re:talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

[91degrees]

I dunno. I'd probably pay.

The people who use it because it's free aren't exactly going to help pay for Kazaa in any way whatever happens. However, there will still be a hard core of loyal supporters, and Kazaa has a brand name.

A lot of people like P2P because they like to get music in mp3 format. We're largely opposed to DRM, but wouldn't object to paying a small charge per song for a fairly flexible format that we can copy from one device to another easily, with a large choice of bitrates.

Only fair if...

[Bagels]

This would only be fair if you're given the chance to sample the file you're downloading and decide whether or not you like its sound and quality (if it is indeed the file you actually wanted). This could be done with a "buying queue" of some sort - after a predetermined amount of time, you must pay for the files in said queue or have them deleted.

To be truly effective, this system would also have to keep track of which files you've already downloaded, so that users don't just download and "preview" songs whenever they want to hear them. It would also mean that the Kazaa folks would have to work to make sure that only one "official" copy (preferably high quality) of a song exists, because otherwise it would be easy for a user to just keep grabbing different rips of the same song and "previewing" them.

Re:Not feasible

[Felipe Hoffa]

I hadn't heard this claim before, and it really sheds some light on USA's postures. Anyway, as you shouldn't believe anything you read on /., I went to find confirmation on this claim, and it seems its true (at least by Harvard School of Law):

A second, related long-term change was the transformation of the United States from a net consumer of intellectual property to a net producer. Until approximately the middle of the nineteenth century, more Americans had an interest in "pirating" copyrighted or patented materials produced by foreigners than had an interest in protecting copyrights or patents against "piracy" by foreigners. The shift in the "balance of trade" had a predictable effect on the stance taken by the United States in international affairs. In the early nineteenth century -- as Charles Dickens learned to his dismay -- the American government was deaf to the pleas of foreign authors that American publishers were reprinting their works without permission. n55 In the late twentieth century, by contrast, the United States has become the world's most vigorous and effective champion of strengthened intellectual-property rights. n56 Thus, for example, the American delegation successfully took a very hard line in the negotiation of the TRIPS agreement, demanding that other nations acquiesce in their generous version of patent and copyright laws. n57 And software piracy in China has triggered a much sterner reaction from the United States than has widespread human-rights violations. n58

The Growth of Intellectual Property: A History of the Ownership of Ideas in the United States [harvard.edu].

Fh