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."
Re:In Other news... (Score:5, Interesting)
Still can't beat free...but these guys are trying (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think you'll ever get people to pay for what they can get for free. Why would I pay $1 for what I can get for free three clicks away?
There is an interesting experiment [yoo-play.com] going on where ex-members of Candlebox, (now KMHW) are giving away their next CD in return for label-like benefits ($$) by increased sales of their sponsors product. It's more like the sports model, where Shaq and Tiger make more money from Reebok and Buick than they do from their team/winnings.
Interesting alternative. But pay Kazaa though my ISP? Wouldn't that violate the "no internet taxes" law? Also, how would FTP, Usenet, and Freenet (among others) transfers be taxed?
It seems that what is happening is that labels are saying "hey this worked before, let's try it again!" Perhaps if more people considered new models [yoo-play.com] like the KMHW one, taxing bandwidth would be unnecessary.
Right on. (Score:2, Interesting)
As a bonus, hopefully this could see a standard p2p system developed and maybe ported to Linux - then I could get rid of my Windows partition completely.
why would they get a share of the moneypie? (Score:2, Interesting)
Perhaps it's all a ploy??? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not feasible (Score:4, Interesting)
The ISP would also need a cut from Kazaa, since they're taking a portion of the bandwidth hit.
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.
From each according to their abilities . . . (Score:5, Interesting)
Time for a few RFCs.
Everybody should do one thing well. Music licensing companies do one thing well -- collect money and offer licenses. P2P services do one thing well, facilitate distribution of content and sharing of information.
I can conceive of a few things we could do to facilitate it.
Imagine a license server protocols for license servers, which are capable of tranmitting a license, song-by-song, that permits the licensee to receive from ANY party a file representing that song. Presumably, the licensee can be given a token and authentication means that a prospective filesharer can check, perhaps by interaction with the license server, which then permits the file-sharer to transmit that song at will.
Now, conceive of various ways to engage in lawful commerce of great tunes:
1) enhance p2p services to perform license checks, so that when a person seeks to receive a tune, it will first have to authenticate the right to receive it. now, p2p can operate completely legally and in the clear -- and evolve to provide whatever value it can; and
2) vendor servers, either on the web, or through applications like iTunes, can provide super-duper interactions with users, combining and putting together tunes and samples, and then sell the tune to a customer (if unlicensed, sell the license -- if licensed, perhaps charge a bit because of special quality encoding or whatever).
Thus, we can always check to see if all of our tunes are licensed, and we can always check to see if the recipient can get our license.
Clearly kinks should be worked out, but I would WAY prefer to see the internet community get together to figure out the right way to do this -- rather than see yet another distribution infrastucture built up to protect yet another ridiculous hunk of turf.
This approach should be VERY attractive to music sources, making it possible to collect real revenues almost immediately, and from a kazillion purchase sources, without worrying too much about technology or distribution, and without having to negotiate with each and every individual prospective vendor -- by making it possible to create lightweight music servers that comply with the law, we make it easy for everybody to get legal.
This would be a good thing.
HAHAhahaha (Score:3, Interesting)
hahahha. Sorry, but am I the only one that just completely fell over laughing after reading that? Its NOT going to happen.
1. People wont allow this to happen. Never. Not in a million years. People wont accept an ISP that just charges them for certain things on the internet. People will have the service turned off if possible. Then what? Will the isp stop them from sharing files?
2. They wont be able to organize every internet service provider in the world to accept their charges
3. Open proxies and hacked boxes. When you see people with tens of thousands of botnets of hacked boxes and lists of thousands of open proxies, this billing system wont work.
4. Why should kazaa get money? They arent really providing the networking power or files, the people are. Real p2p networks like gnutella just cut out the middle man and will always be free.
bah
Who cares? (Score:3, Interesting)
Kazaa (Score:3, Interesting)
Agoric is essential (Score:3, Interesting)
Ultimately this leads to the classic "Tragedy of the Commons" in which a few are exploited by the many.
The only cure it to come up with some sort of compensation system that rewards those willing to share. The MoJo Nation project was an attempt at this.
BT is where it's at (Score:1, Interesting)
Yeah, that's how you tell a p2p network's health right there. Just search for a popular file, and see how many "popular" (i.e. multi-sourced) files are there by that name. The more popular files going by the same name (but with different sizes/md5's), the bigger chance that some of those will be fake, or perhaps very crappy.
Now do the same for BT!
I have never seen fake files on BT (I use good BT sites like voracity and suprnova). I think this is because people just don't like to go through the process of seeding huge fake games or movies (in kazaa this might improve their rating by having people download the "fake file" a lot). In BT, there is no rating or point system, so fake files are useless. Even if anti-piracy groups or the RIAA try to seed fake files, I think they won't succeed for 2 reasons:
1) If people download a fake file, they try it out, notice it's fake, and delete it. Boom, one less client to connect to for that torrent. Eventually the torrent dies automatically.
2) Seeder IP's can be blacklisted by trackers to block fake seeders from RIAA, Overpeer, etc. This would be easy to do (you could even use KazaaLiteK++'s already existing list)
In short, BT is the future!
Re:talk about shooting yourself in the foot. (Score:3, Interesting)
chris.
I couldn't tell you what kind of USENET servers my ISP has. Most people that are serious about USENET pay for premium service anyway. I pay $15 a month for airnews.net service at 256kb, and have for over 7 years. I may go a couple months without using USENET, or use it extensively for a week, but I pay for unlimited but throttled access for a reason.
As long as you have the smarts to filter it a bit, USENET is still the best way to go. I have tried Gnutella, Kazaa (deleted that piece of shit after all the spywear popped up) and a few others, but I can find what I want with less headaches with USENET, with just a little patience, AND the download times are much much better.
I usually go looking for very unusual stuff only, since I have a few thousand mainstream music CD's that I already paid for. I also pick up original stuff, some of which is better than what you get on the radio. A premium service usually holds binaries for at least 1 week in busy groups, and 2 or more weeks in moderately busy group.
_Fortunately_, USERNET and the whole concept of MIME, Base64, mulitpart messages, PAR, ARJ, RAR and decoding is beyond most simple minds (even tho Forte Agent does half of it on the fly) which helps keep the medium from being totally spammed out by newbies. Since my USENET access is ISP independent, I am not worried about my ISP getting scrict since it only takes 256kb bandwidth for me, and they can't block port 110 without getting tons of bad feedback.
My experience with users of Kazaa/Morphius/Napster is they are too lazy to actually learn how to do something (not all, but most). They are usually the lowest form of computer users, not willing to learn simple USENET. They don't understand what SPYWEAR is, how to update Windows, use Outlook, and get viruses due to not updating Norton. This is NOT a flame, just an observation, and I have dozens of friends who fall in this catagory. Because of this, seeing P2P die would be a good thing. I like them, but hate what their ignorance does to the network in general.
Re:Don't laugh too hard... (Score:3, Interesting)
By the way, I work at an ISP. I saw the huge chaos caused by the blaster and welchia worms. Just think if all those computers started accessing something which automatically charged their account and then Kazaa had a huge bill for the ISP to pay. The ISP isnt going to like this either. They arent going to tell their customers 'oh by the way, were going to start charging you when you access the following: