Guardian: Music file sharing to be offered legally
Online music fans will for the first time be able to legally share tracks by big names such as Oasis, Beyonce, David Bowie and Elvis Presley after the artists’ record label signed a ground-breaking deal with a new internet service provider.
In what some see as signalling a dramatic shift in the way consumers buy music, the provider, Playlouder, has licensed acts from SonyBMG, the world’s second largest record label, and is confident that the other two big record labels, Universal and EMI, will follow suit…
Because there will be no restrictions on the format in which the traded music is encoded, users will be free to transfer songs to any type of digital music player, including the market leading Apple iPod, or burn them to CD…
Because all Playlouder subscribers will share tracks over its own network Mr Hitchman said that the company could track the files and, through digital fingerprinting technology, make sure that record companies were remunerated accordingly from money set aside from Playlouder’s revenues each month.
I find this newspaper report to be very weird if it is entirely accurate. I cannot see how this service can function in the way it is intended if users truly are allowed to trade files in any format without restrictions. If true then a typical music track could be digitised and formatted in many different formats at various different bitrates and shared over the network, yet through digital fingerprinting the service is able to ascertain what music track it is and pass on appropriate payment to the copyright owners.
Such a file could even be concealed through a steganographic type application to resemble some other file such as a movie file of a home video that has no licensing problems as the user is freely allowed to share what they themselves have created.
Furthermore record corporations seem to be heavily in favour of DRM technologies in order to add restrictions to prevent piracy their willingness to license their music to Playlouder without the DRM technologies would seem to me to be counterproductive to their aims. Any non-DRM file that is legally shared using this service can in the future be illegally shared in the way that current legally downloaded files from services such as iTunes cannot.
But then again they may have read Chris Anderson’s fascinating piece on the economics of “piracy” and whether a little piracy can actually allow for more net revenues to vendors. Via BoingBoing and Waxy.
