Kazaa Backs Plan To Bill P2P Music Transfers 388
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."
talk about shooting yourself in the foot. (Score:5, Insightful)
If they did that, how long would it be before another network popped up to replace them? Hours? I guess they forgot they aren't the ones who invented P2P...
I guess they also don't realize people use the network....because it's... free... Not free and it will go away.
This might actually be good .... (Score:3, Insightful)
If there was ever an incentive to get people to lock down their wireless networks, this is it.
ISPs will probably also like the idea that it provides an incentive for people to not share their broadband connections with their neighbors.
Why Share (Score:5, Insightful)
What is the reason to share if you are paying for downloads?
Uh right (Score:3, Insightful)
Frankly, I don't see why they should make people pay for a service they're not providing, especially when they don't know why somebody is downloading an MP3.
Yeah, this'll work (Score:2, Insightful)
Once you give something to the public, taking it away isn't very practical, especially when the technical ability to 'give back' something that has been taken away exists among many talented people. It might not have been legitimate to start the initial P2P network sharing of music (though I'm not here to debate ethics), but it's been done, has been widely adopted, and is seen positively by music consumers. It's not going to go away when fifty million people want it.
If the RIAA wants to do something useful to preserve profit, they should provide lower quality versions of the tunes available for download. Three things that could be beneficial/changing for this:
- It'll give people something to download and listen to, if their reason for being on P2P networks is to preview music before contemplating buying it. They get to hear it, and they might be willing to spend their hard-earned money for a better copy.
- It'll put lots and lots of poorer quality mp3s on the filesharing networks, making piracy of the CD rips more difficult. If you can't download it and you really want it, buy it.
- Lowering the price of CDs will cause consumers to actually preview and buy music "legitimately", rather than relying solely on mp3 downloads which can be awkward to play in cars and on larger stereos without a computer connection. Not everyone knows how to take mp3s and turn them into CDs.
The RIAA doesn't seem interested in doing this though, so the situation will continue in perpituity.Hmm.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Why should I pay Kazaa when their service plays only a small part in the P2P network?
Re:Once More With Meaning... (Score:1, Insightful)
4 years late. (Score:2, Insightful)
Yea, but iTunes for PC launches next Thursday. Thus ends the MP3 "war". After that anyone who wants to pay can, and anyone who doesn't can go elsewhere. I don't see a crappy P2P service anywhere in the $ picture.
Credit Card required? (Score:3, Insightful)
"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."
Those idiots over at Sharman realize that the majority of their userbase doesn't have credit cards don't they? Also, this is not something parents are likely to just hand over their card for. "Sure Jimmy, you can download all you want and charge it to my card, AND open us up to potential lawsuits!" Nope, I can't picture that one happening any time soon.
The one thing I would be interested in seeing is if by paying....if you were to download a copywrited file illegally, and then get busted...would they indemnify you?
Would they be held responsible because they would be profiting from the distribution of copywrited material?
Kazaa is now dead (Score:2, Insightful)
Sherman Networks seems to think that users will just stick with Kazaa because they know its name and they don't want to switch because Kazaa is nice and familiar. Their buisness plan just isn't viable. For example if I wanted to download a song on Kazaa I would get more than 100 matches. I choose to download one and it turns out to be a hoax, but its too late. Its already been charged to my bill. If they want to have any hope at success then they need to switch from decentralised to centralised, but of course that would defeat the purpose. So then they would have to introduce a rating system so users could tell if it was a hoax, and they'd have to figure out a way to eliminate wrongly name songs.
I personally believe then that Kazaa's only choice is to stick to giving their adware-riddled software away for free.
Re:talk about shooting yourself in the foot. (Score:2, Insightful)
Stay Away From My ISP Bill (Score:5, Insightful)
Ummm... someone gets a virus on my box, then convinces my ISP that I dowloaded a whole bunch of crap, then I get a huge bill, then I have to prove I didn't download?
No Thanks.
If that's going to work, the ISP had d*** well better be sure they are filtering packets on a per user basis, so that I can't download anything through the Kazaa port unless I really am a registered Kazaa user, and they had better make sure that if "I" try to do that they flag it as a virus and not a new signup or something. No other way.
Look.
The ISP billing right now is "pure". I get billed for connectivity and that's it. The last thing I need is for my connection to turn into something like the POTS line, where kids in the house could "dial" the equivalent of a 900 number.
Re:talk about shooting yourself in the foot. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In Other news... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd like to purchase some Frog Brigade or moe. CDs, but not if a single cent is going to the RIAA.
Re:Still can't beat free...but these guys are tryi (Score:2, Insightful)
Go ahead and be a 'consumer' if that's what you're into. I'm glad somebody in the past 'had' all these records. Some of it is damn fine music to listen to, and it wouldn't have made it's way to me if they'd just listened to the radio.
Paying for peer-to-peer (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, it is possible they're just stupid.
How is this any better...? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anonymous P2P file swapping cannot support a pay model unless there's some way to trust the people you're swapping with. I can think of two ways to do that: 1) something like PGP's web of trust concept; 2) some sort of centralized system for rating users the way eBay does. But PGP's web of trust doesn't really seem to have taken off in any big way, and a centralized authority negates a lot of the advantages of P2P in the first place.
Frankly, I don't think that the record companies will go for this either, since there's no mention of DRM, and they have no assurace that you'll actually get what they produce instead of some modified version which they can't control and which might make them look bad.
Fair answer --too late. (Score:4, Insightful)
Leave my ISP billing alone. I know what my Internet access costs each month and that is the way it should stay. As soon as one charge hits the bill, everybody is going to want in and Internet ISP billing begins to look like the mess that is our phone bill today. --No thanks.
Mp3 music is crap at all but the highest quality. Most of the encodes you find on Kazaa are poor. Downloads are iffy as well. Add this up and what do we find? Millions of people downloading bunches of crap music.
Go back a few years ago. FM is crap, unless you take the time to really make the most of it. This is a lot like spending tons of time on Kazaa looking for only the best encodes. People all have tape decks. Add it up and you have millions of people making crappy copies of music.
Didn't hurt things then, does not now.
Just for the record, I no longer use P2P for music. (I will still get other things however.) Got tired of the crap. Funny, I got tired of the crap taping FM as well.
How to trade? With friends via SSH. Nice and private, not too much distribution. In fact, this form of distribution is not too much different from people trading discs.
I would be more inclined to encourage this, but I am not sure we can put a centralized payment scheme on a decentralized service in a fair manner. These jokers should have taken the first Napster deal. They would be making a lot of money right now and would own a popular name. It's too late now.
So will all mp3 downloads be taxed? How? What if the creator wants to provide the content? Do I still need to pay for it? If I am paying for one kind of download, why not others? If downloads begin to be charged according to their type at the ISP, what exactly am I paying for? Will general Internet access get cheaper? Who pays for the new ISP billing systems? Me --you?
This is not the answer. At this point, the answer is marketing. Clean honest marketing of music with added value services and content attached.
Basically, these folks need to earn their keep. Since we all know distribution is cheap, why do they need to make the money they do? Hell, it was cheap with CD media. As far as I am concerned, they have been making far too much already.
They could link music downloads with all sorts of things to make plenty of money. They could make the downloads worth downloading as Apple clearly shows.
What to do with Kazaa? Not sure, but I don't want to pay for something I do not use.
What the Sharman execs don't get. (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides the obvious user reaction about this, I think it should be pointed out that they do not understand the record industry's position at all. The execs at Sharman Networks believe that the RIAA and their contributors only want to legitimize music distribution on the Internet.
They could not be more wrong. The record industry does not care if the artists get paid. It cares if it occupies the lucrative middle-man position in music distribution. If they were to do this deal with Kazaa, they would be sharing their monopoly rents with another greedy group of execs whould could completely usurp their power over their golden egg laying hen. The music industry wants to be the only distributor of music on and offline and in any alternate universe that remains to be discovered.
Therefore, this plan, however wicked and evil to any reasonable person concerned with freedom, is twice as unpalatable to the monopolists working in the offices of the RIAA or any organization that actively contributes money to it.
Obviously, this also means that the execs at Sharman Networks are an untrustworthy ally in the struggle for freedom against the tyranny of ignorance created by copyright law. While that should not have been a surprise, it sounds like more alternative and easy to use clients for serverless P2P networks need to be created (and fast) as insurance from the potential loss of such an important information distribution system.
Pay P2P? (Score:3, Insightful)
If I download a file, say 'Pulsedriver - Galaxy.mp3' and it turned out to be 3 and a half minutes of static would I still get charged? Probably.
If I make my own music and people download it from the service, will I get a share of the profits? Can you see it? Nah, didn't think so.
This idea is DOA. Plus the fact that hosting a 4Mb MP3 these days costs very little, and the provider gets much better control over the downloads. What's the point?
Obviously the answer is ..... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In Other news... (Score:2, Insightful)
Are you kidding? 90% completed - then transmission error
No Movies, No Books, (ok, no virus)
No multiple sources?
I DON'T want NAPSTER - not the old one, not the nw one...
Kazaa Lite is fine by me.