File Swapping for fun and Profit How do you like them apples?
Paid content will invade the Kazaa file-swapping network Monday in a major commercial test of a service that until now has lured millions of people with free music, video and other digital files.
Along with finding search results that point to unfettered MP3s, Kazaa users will begin to see links to songs for sale from record labels and advertisements linked to keyword searches.The move is fraught with controversy as it is the first application of Altnet, a service from Kazaa partner Brilliant Digital Entertainment that came to light amid a Web privacy storm last month. Some Kazaa users reacted with outrage when they discovered that bits of Altnet had been quietly installed on their computers, creating a network to be manipulated by a little-known company whose ambitions were unknown.
From the internal link:
Brilliant Digital Entertainment, a California-based digital advertising technology company, has been distributing its 3D ad technology along with the Kazaa software since late last fall. But in a federal securities filing Monday, the company revealed it also has been installing more ambitious technology that could turn every computer running Kazaa into a node in a new network controlled by Brilliant Digital.The company plans to wake up the millions of computers that have installed its software in as soon as four weeks. It plans to use the machines--with their owners' permission--to host and distribute other companies' content, such as advertising or music. Alternatively, it might borrow people's unused processing power to help with other companies' complicated computing tasks.
How's that for piracy? The pirates steal files from the corporate bad guys, so the corporate bad guys steal bandwidth and processor time from the pirates.
Sounds fair to me.
Of course, what would be even more fair is for the P2P networks to charge a monthly royalty to each user based on bandwidth usage, pass that royalty on to the artists, not the parasitic publishers, and let the music play.
Posted by Rich at May 22, 2002 12:55 AM